Intrepid Women Adventures in Anthropology

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.

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