The extraordinary women featured in this book defied early twentieth-century conventions to carry out ground breaking field research in distant parts of the world where ‘ladies’ were not meant to travel. Here you will meet Barbara Freire-Marreco living among Pueblo people in south-western 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 north-east India. Bower was even made an honorary Captain in the British Army leading an irregular force of Naga men in scouting operations against the Japanese during the Second World War.

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. One woman, the Māori scholar Mākereti, wrote about her own people, but spent the final years of her life far from home in Oxfordshire. 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.