and ethnic relations, he failed to analyze his data sufficiently. Reina's (1966) research explored

Mayan women who worked as potters and the roles of Mayan women in religious ceremonies.

While Reina's work tended to affirm Wolf's construction (Wolf 1959) of communities as closed

and resistant to outside forces of change, it departs from the pattern of describing women solely

as reproductive vessels by examining their roles in wealth production and social functions.

 In the 1970s, anthropological studies of "women only" began to appear in order to

compensate for having ignored women in earlier cultural studies (Moore 1988). The work of

Maynard (1963) and Chinchilla (1977) examined women's productive roles in the context of

Guatemala's expanding economy. They concentrated on the increasing participation of women in

producing wealth and maintaining their households as economic pressures forced men to become

more involved in a cash economy. Though criticized by some, their work was critical to

expanding the scope of research on Guatemalan women. Ehlers (1990) and Bossen (1984)

believed that the research of the 1960s and 1970s was flawed by fragmentation and a scarcity of

evidence. Further, the research of this era failed to address the impact of significant social and

cultural realities, such as the way the coffee industry changed Guatemala's economy in the late

nineteenth century and how labor laws forced Mayan men and women to work on plantations far

from their natal communities. Since the development of gender roles cannot be examined

adequately without some acknowledgement of the important cultural changes that affect these

roles, the previous research on Guatemalan women is flawed.

 The search for understanding women, the nature of gender inequality, and the gendered

division of labor became central to anthropological and feminist research in the 1980s. Bossen's

(1984) comparative research on Mayan and Ladina women examined Guatemala's integration in

the world economy and the way this integration affected gender. Bossen proposed that gender