Shirley Ardener


Shirley G. Ardener is a pioneer of research on women and a committed anthropological researcher working with Bakweri people in Cameroon since the 1950s, initially with her husband Edwin Ardener.

Career

In 1964, she published an important analysis of forms of credit that has been influential on subsequent work on the informal economy and microcredit systems: see Rotating savings and credit association. Her work as editor has seen the publication of many key texts such as Perceiving Women, 1975. This collection also includes her essay Sexual Insult and Female Militancy, a foundational text demonstrating how the personal can be made deeply political.
She helped found and was the founding director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford informally since 1973, formally since 1983. The CCCRW has now become the International Gender Studies Centre based at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
She was the minute taker at the meeting that Dag Hammarskjöld had in Cameroon in the run up to independence in Cameroon on 2 January 1959.

Awards and honours

Ardener won the Welcome Medal for Anthropology in 1962. She was awarded the OBE in 1991.

Selected publications