Intrepid Women at the Pitt-Rivers Museum
On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads.
The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020 – and will eventually be returned to the aboriginal tribes in Ecuador and other South American countries where they are believed to have come from – their provenance is still unclear. But the crowd in the museum on March 7th wasn’t there for to discuss tsantsa or the ongoing issue of repatriation of cultural objects.
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Instead, they were there to celebrate a book about the women responsible for some of the fascinating objects, photographs, and textiles that ended up in the museum. Founded in 1884, the Pitt-Rivers Museum houses one of the world’s great collections of anthropology and archeology and is one of Oxford’s most visited sites. Yet until recently, the women anthropologists who contributed to its remarkable collections had remained largely unknown.
The publication of the book “Intrepid Women: Adventures in Anthropology,” was why I and many others had come to the Museum’s gallery that evening. Based on a soon-to-close exhibit at the museum and edited by the exhibit’s curator, Julia Nicholson, the book profiles six women anthropologists working in the early 20th century who defied conventions to undertake field work in distant parts of the globe.
Published by Bodleian Library Publishing, the book focuses on Barbara Freire-Marreco, who lived among Pueblo people in south-western USA; Maria Czaplicka, who studied reindeer herders of Siberia; Beatrice Blackwood who spent time in remote villages of Papua New Guinea; Elsie McDougall, who lived among textile artists in Mexico and Guatemala; and Ursula Graham Bower, who fell in love with the Naga Hills of northeast India. Bower was even led an irregular force of Naga men in scouting operations against the Japanese during the Second World War.
“All six women had an inner fire that enabled them to overcome economic and social barriers, chauvinism, discrimination, and misogyny, and to carry out the groundbreaking work that our book seeks to document, illustrate, and celebrate,” Nicholson told the crowd.
Book launch for “Intrepid Women” on March 7, 2025 at Pitt-Rivers Museum
Professor Dr. Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum’s director, made her own statement at the podium by wearing a black t-shirt that read “Global Feminist.” She’d bought it the night before at an Annie Lenox fundraiser in London at the Royal Albert Hall. “The current moment…requires us to loudly proclaim that we are here and that we can be celebrated and that we do an amazing work.”
Amen.
Laura Van Broekhoven, Director of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford
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Julia Flynn Siler is an academic visitor at Oxford University this spring. Her most recent book is The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Knopf)
