New Book: Intrepid Women: Adventures in Anthropology
Meet the pioneering female anthropologists who coped with illness, shipwreck, loneliness and misogyny to document the remarkable lives of people around the world.
In Intrepid Women, editor Julia Nicholson brings to life the extraordinary stories of six pioneering female anthropologists who overcame many challenges to document the lives of people all over the world. These intrepid women, from a variety of backgrounds, defied the constraints of the male-dominated worlds in which they were raised, each embarking on groundbreaking field research in challenging and often dangerous conditions.
Barbara Freire-Marreco worked in New Mexico and Arizona between 1910 and 1913, living among Pueblo people. She was the first woman to study anthropology at Oxford, the first British woman to receive a qualification in anthropology and the first to undertake anthropological fieldwork in North America. When she arrived at Oxford, she was not allowed, among other restrictions, to attend lectures without the lecturer’s permission.
Aged twenty-nine, Maria Czaplicka set off from London alone to lead an expedition to north-central Siberia from June 1914 to September 1915, living alongside reindeer herders. She later became the first female lecturer in anthropology at Oxford University.
Beatrice Blackwood, who went on to run the Pitt Rivers Museum and lecture at Oxford, carried out survey work in Canada and the USA in the 1920s, followed by anthropological fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
As a Māori woman who wrote about her own people, Mākereti’s whole life can be seen as one long research project. After settling in Oxfordshire in 1912, and becoming the first indigenous women to enrol at Oxford University in 1922, she also made a trip home to consult the elders in Whakarewarewa, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 1926.
The wealthy middle-aged widow Elsie McDougall, who survived being shipwrecked in January 1935, made thirteen research and collecting trips to Mexico and Guatemala between 1926 and 1940, staying with textile artists.
Lastly, after making short visits in 1937 and 1939, Ursula Graham Bower lived in the Naga Hills in north-east India from 1940 to 1945, latterly as an honorary captain in the British Army, leading an irregular force of Naga men in scouting operations against the Japanese during the Second World War. Bower had a bounty put on her head by the Japanese in 1944 and fully expected to be captured and killed, as did her Naga comrades.
Despite their varied trials, each of these women made vital contributions to anthropology, forging relationships with local communities, learning languages, and challenging prevailing attitudes towards race and culture. They documented the lives of the people with whom they lived with exceptional attention to detail, insisting on the dignity and humanity of those they studied.
Intrepid Women highlights these extraordinary women's courage and commitment, showing how they overcame both personal and societal obstacles to make lasting contributions to the field of anthropology.
Julia Nicholson was Curator and Joint Head of Collections at the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, 1994–2024.
Intrepid Women: Adventures in Anthropology is available to buy from the Bodleian Shop, the Pitt Rivers Museum shop, all good bookshops and online.
