Rose Oldfield Hayes

{{Short description|American anthropologist}}

Rose Oldfield Hayes (born 1936) was an American anthropologist at the State University of New York, Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo). After doing fieldwork in Sudan in 1970 interviewing women who had been infibulated, Hayes wrote the first scholarly paper on female genital mutilation (FGM) that used that term, and the first to incorporate information from the women themselves. Published in American Ethnologist in 1975,{{cite journal|last=Hayes|first=Rose Oldfield|date=17 June 1975|title=Female Genital Mutilation, Fertility Control, Women's Roles, and the Patrilineage in Modern Sudan: A Functional Analysis|journal=American Ethnologist|volume=2|issue=4|pages=617–633|jstor=643328|doi=10.1525/ae.1975.2.4.02a00030|doi-access=free}} the paper represented an important step forward in understanding the practice.{{cite book|last1=Gruenbaum|first1=Ellen|author-link=Ellen Gruenbaum|title=The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective|date=2001|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press|location=Philadelphia|page=21}}