Intrepid Women - by Julia Nicholson (Hardcover)

About the Book

Introducing the extraordinary women who broke through the proverbial glass ceiling to carry out revolutionary field research in distant parts of the world 'unsuitable for ladies'. Here you will meet Barbara Freire-Marreco living among Pueblo people in south-western USA; Maria Czaplicka with reindeer herders of Siberia; Beatrice Blackwood in remote villages of Papua New Guinea; Elsie McDougall among textile artists in Mexico and Guatemala; and Ursula Graham Bower in the Naga Hills of northeast India. Bower was even made 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. These pioneering anthropologists learned local languages, established relationships across supposed cultural boundaries, insisted on the dignity of humanity in all cultural settings and documented with remarkable meticulousness the lives of the peoples with whom they lived and worked. One woman, the Maori scholar Makereti, wrote about her own people, but spent the final years of her life far from home in Oxfordshire. Each of these women collected objects and left archives of photographs, manuscripts, diaries and letters, which tell the inspirational stories of their encounters and adventures. --Back cover.

Book Synopsis

True accounts of groundbreaking women anthropologists defying gender norms in the early 20th century.

The extraordinary women featured in Intrepid Women defied early twentieth-century conventions to carry out groundbreaking field research in distant parts of the world where ladies were not meant to travel. In this book, you will meet Barbara Freire-Marreco living among Pueblo people in Southwestern USA; Maria Czaplicka with reindeer herders of Siberia; Beatrice Blackwood in remote villages of Papua New Guinea; Elsie McDougall among textile artists in Mexico and Guatemala; and Ursula Graham Bower in the Naga Hills of Northeast India.

Coping with illness, shipwreck, loneliness, and misogyny, these pioneering anthropologists learned local languages, established relationships across supposed cultural boundaries, insisted on the dignity of humanity in all cultural settings, and documented--with remarkable meticulousness--the lives of the peoples with whom they lived and worked. Each of these women collected objects and left archives of photographs, manuscripts, diaries, and letters, which tell the inspirational stories of their encounters and adventures.

Review Quotes

"Anthropology was once a swashbuckling, adventurous field, built around freewheeling interactions with [peoples] in far-flung lands. Ursula Graham Bower was one such early anthropologist--and boy did she swashbuckle...Intrepid Women is filled with characters like Bower...these stories of a more adventurous time are illustrated with photos of strange and beautiful artifacts from the museum."-- "Reason"

"A stunningly illustrated book."-- "Nature"

About the Author

Julia Nicholson was curator and joint head of collections at the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum from 1994 to 2024.