One way to understand women's consciousness is to make visible the cultures it creates. Culture may be defined as the ordered system of meanings in terms of which people define their world, express their feelings, and make their judgments. Cultural interpretation, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has suggested, is a process of searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms-words, images, institutions, behaviors-in terms of which . people actually represent themselves to themselves and to one another....To name women's consciousness is to identify its webs of significance and meaning, to make it intelligible on its own terms. This identification, according to Geertz, is a process of cultural interpretation: the analysis... is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behavior, institutions or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly-that is-thickly described.