"There Were No Women": The Pitt Rivers Museum and Britain's First Female Anthropologists

Wednesday 21 April, 17.00 - 18.30 

Register for this event here

Image of cover of Undreamed Shores book

In the opening two decades of the twentieth century, at a time when women were barely recognized at the University of Oxford, five women trained at the Pitt Rivers Museum and became Britain's first professional female anthropologists. Between them, they did pioneering research in Easter Island, Siberia, Egypt, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, and the pueblos of southwest America. No other British university had trained active, professional female anthropologists before 1920. Oxford was ahead of its time. And yet Oxford was an extremely conservative institution which was largely hostile to women. 

Based on her book Undreamed Shores, the Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology, Frances Larsen's talk explores how these five women successfully infiltrated such a closed, masculine community.

 

Supported by TORCH Oxford.

This webinar is part of the Pitt RIvers Museum Radical Hope series. All talks will be recorded and are available to view after the event on the Radical Hope page.