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.

http://www.kathrynshistoryblog.com/2021/03/undreamed-shores-review.html

In 1891 Katherine Routledge went up to Oxford to study a diploma in anthropology, one of the first generation of women to have such an opportunity. Fifteen years later she set off for British East Africa where she, along with her husband, William Scoresby Routledge, began the research which would form their joint book With a Prehistoric People. Scoresby remarked of how, as a woman, she was able to achieve access no male anthropologist had ever been able to, understanding and documenting the lives of African women. 1913 they would embark on their most notable work; the first large-scale survey of Easter Island.

Routledge is just one of five pioneering female anthropologists featured in Frances Larson's new book Undreamed Shores, which was released this week. Anthropology isn't something I've really ever read about before, so this was a really interesting look at the history of the field over the last century. Also interesting for me was that it focused on five women who were among the first to study at Oxford, something we can take for granted today.


Winifred Blackman, right, depicted in Egypt (source)
Another of the featured anthropologists, Winifred Blackman, suffered the jealousy of her brother, Aylward, seemingly easily being admitted to the university before her family were able to raise the money for her to join the Diploma in Anthropology in 1912. Still, it would not be until 1920 that women were entitled to be awarded full degrees by the university. By this time Blackman had moved to Egypt where she worked in the "perfectly heavenly" desert site of Meir, excavating burial sites. In 1927 she published her ethnography, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt.

In the middle of this development of anthropology and the growing involvement of female scholars was the unignorable factor of the First World War, which abruptly halted many anthropological studies, thrust women into new roles, and also granted them more scholarly opportunities. Having recently read about the lives of Vera Brittain (a contemporary of the women Larson writes about) and Ethel Alec-Tweedie, it was interesting to read another similar perspective.


Maria Czaplicka, depicted on the deer (source)
As women in acadaemia the anthropologists worked in some really interesting areas of the war effort. Maria Czaplicka (known to her Oxford friends as "Chip"), a Polish anthropologist, had been studying in Siberia at the outbreak of war and had a difficult journey across Europe in 1915 as she tried to make her way back to Oxford. Upon her return, she was employed in the War Trade Intelligence Departmet alongside fellow scholar Barbara Freire-Marreco, who later wrote that Czaplicka 'undertook "a considerable burden of confidential work for the Historical Section of the Foreign Office'." Although their work was desk-based and therefore seen as more 'suitable' for women, these two women were able to make a real impact on the war effort through their employment.

However, the war also opened up the opportunity for Czaplicka to become the first full-time female lecturer employed by the University of Oxford, following the departure of the male incumbents for the services. As Larson describes, she was diligent in working both roles to the best of her abilities, clearly making the most of the opportunities which would have previously been unthinkable.

Further wartime vacancies at the University Museum and the Pitt-Rivers Museum (my favourite in Oxford and the home of anthropology here) were filled by women, with Winifred Blackman and Beatrice Blackwood taking on assistant roles. While they still worked under the inaugural curator, Henry Balfour, they were nonetheless able to make an impact with their work in a way they weren't able to before.


While these women seized the openings available to them, there is an interesting difference with Katherine Routledge, who refused to engage in war work. I read online that her family were Quakers, so I do wonder whether their potential pacifism had some impact here, although sadly Larson doesn't address this. She does, however, describe the interest with which Routledge saw the outbreak of war. 'Katherine declared that she was glad to be living through it and seemed to treat the war as another intellectual interest rather than as a personal ordeal'. In this way, it seems that Routledge viewed the war very much through an anthropological lens and not as a worried citizen.

The First World War is by no means the central focus of Undreamed Shores, and to me, who mostly reads books centred on the war, I found this an interesting perspective. The war was not in this way the central focus of the women's lives or the main pivot around which their life experience turned, but rather an incidental period along the way; another experience to contribute to their bank of anthropological knowledge. This book was definitely well-worth a read, looking at a different area of acadaemia and viewing the historical time period in a different way. Having finished it, I can't wait for the Pitt Rivers to reopen so I can take a look at some of the artefacts studied by these five pioneering female academics.

Kathryn

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.