A fascinating book an amazing story of these strong women who blazed. a path who let nothing deter them.I really did not know much about this unique group of women this well written book really enlightened me.Will be recommending.#netgalley #granata

This was such an interesting book on a topic I'm embarrassed to say I knew very little about. I really felt I understood part of these women's lives after read the book - I felt I partially lived it.

trigger warning
[ misogyny, colonialism, racism, suicide, mental illness, grief, slur against sinti and roma, being hospitalized against ones will (hide spoiler)]

In this book, Frances Larson explores the stories of five women who pioneered in British Anthropology: Katherine Routledge, Barbara Freire-Marreco, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman and Beatrice Blackwood.
At no point does the author claim to have chosen the most important women, or in general the most important anthropologists. She does not explain her choices, though, but they center around all of them having ties to Oxford so it makes sense. The changes of topic from one person to another are very elegantly managed, too.

So, to sum it up in short, since anthropology was a new field, the teachers were fighting for every student who was interested in getting and education on that topic, and since there was enough space, and the teachers were more liberal minded than others, women were given the opportunity to attend classes, though it took a while till every student was eligible for a degree.
Yes, women suffrage is a topic, but not a big one as these five women had other, more pressing problems.

The main one being that officials didn't deem it safe for an unaccompanied woman to live with natives, and in turn if it was deemed safe, it mostly meant that the villages already were praying in church and had abandoned the traditions that made them so interesting in the first place.

The author chose to not include footnotes, but instead the reader can access a page on her website with further information and the relevant sources.

I was not prepared for how grim some of these stories turned out to be. Two of the five women died by suicide, a third was shut away in a mental hospital in a fight for inherited money.
I can hardly fault the author for things that have happened, it's just unfortunate that I turned to this book to distract me from a bad mental health day.

I liked this book. I will read more from the same author, and more on this topic.
I will seek out the works by these five women, especially those on Egyptian peasantry life.

The arc was provided by the publisher.

Giving this three stars because I was unable to read it. I was approved on the 4th and NetGalley archived this before I had a chance to download it, which is a shame because it does look nice.

Maria Czaplicka wrote her book, <i>Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology</i>, in just eighteen months. Her work was praised as a triumph of translation and synthesis, however, it soon became apparent that she still lacks first-hand knowledge and critical power about her subject. Soon she embarked on an expedition to Siberia with three companions: English ornithologist Maud Doria Haviland, English painter Dora Curtis, and Henry Usher Hall from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to making her breakthrough in her Yenisei Expedition between 1914-1915, she had to face her fate as a woman with women’s second-class citizenship at Oxford.

As Czaplicka was a foreigner originally from Warsaw, at that time in Russian-Poland, her matter was also a social concern for the Delegacy for Women Students who oversaw women’s education at Oxford as it was assumed that she is accustomed to more independent social conditions of university life and might disregard social mores. It was also with well-wishes from her family that she was able to leave Warsaw, where the residents had been forced to speak Russian for years ever since the Partitions of Poland, abandon their customs, and give up any of their intellectual aspirations. But it will soon become apparent that the social circumstances where Czaplicka grew up gave more opportunities for her to be adept in mastering foreign languages and understanding of the Siberian culture that came into fruition with her studies of Shamanism in Siberia which put criticism into the Western perspective of the term ‘Arctic Hysteria’.

Czaplicka’s story is only one of the five women presented in this book who deserved more recognition as laying the foundation in modern British anthropology. They came of age during the time as the discipline of anthropology was transforming from being seen as literature research done from office desk into more of fieldwork which involves living for some considerable period of time in a foreign culture to understand the locals and put the research into writing a book after coming home. The fieldworks offered the five women more freedoms and opportunities, as compared to the limitations imposed upon women in that era in an academic setting. As a discipline, anthropology was a small discipline with limited jobs and plenty of men to take them. Barbara Freire-Marreco, Beatrice Blackwood, Winifred Blackman, Katherine Routledge, and Maria Czaplicka in this book are described as pioneers in British anthropology who took their time conducting field research in foreign areas with primitive cultures that were sometimes still untouched by the Westerners and brought countless potentials for them to be killed. At the time when educating women was still considered radical, subversive, and dangerous, they pursued opportunities to liberate themselves.

As both a biography and literature review of a discipline, Frances Larson does offer us interesting viewpoints to her research. At one point, she seeks to inform us about the state of development that British anthropology had seen in the early 20th century with fieldwork finally be seen as an integral component of anthropological research through the advocacy of Bronislaw Malinowski. His work, <I>Argonauts of the Western Pacific</i>, which was the result of spending several years studying the indigenous culture at the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia catapulted his position as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe in the 1920s. At another point, Frances Larson is also keen on analysing the roles of the five women in this book who overturned the common narrative of their time which saw women as fragile beings whose sole purpose in life was to get married and borne children. Some of these women faced tragic deaths: Maria Czaplicka committed suicide after failing to secure a grant for her second visit to Siberia, Katherine Routledge was put into a mental asylum after a tragic divorce from her husband who took her family estates, Winifred Blackman died in a mental hospital in England without being able to revisit Egypt because of the Second World War.