UNDREAMED SHORES

'The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology' is the sub-title of this multiple biography of five women who arrived at the University of Oxford determined to study remote communities a world away from their own. Barbara Freire-Marreco travelled to New Mexico and Arizona in 1910 and 1913. Katherine Routledge voyaged to Easter Island in 1913-16 and to French Polynesia, south of Ecuador to Mangareva 1921-23. Maria Czaplicka journeyed from Paris through Moscow and Minusinsk to Golchikha in Siberia 1914-15. Winifred Blackman travelled from London to Cairo via Venice and Corfu in 1920-39. Beatrice Blackwood took a voyage from Port Said via Columbo, Sydney and through New Caledonia to Papua New Guinea to Melanesia in 1929 and also to the Solomon Islands 1929-30 and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea 1936-38. These are the voyages as mapped in colour on the endpapers and there are 28 further illustrations in the text showing the intrepid travellers taking tea with local officials or in a family group photograph on a rare visit home, travelling in a wicker carriage through Siberia or as students on an Archaeology summer camp. In the unchartered interiors of New Guinea amid uprisings along the Nile and on remote Easter Island, they found new freedoms and bore witness to now-vanished worlds. Through their work they overturned some of the most pernicious myths that dogged their gender, and proved that women could be explorers and scientists too. Yet when they returned to England they found only loss, madness and regret waiting for them. Following the lives of her subjects through women's suffrage, two world wars and into the second half of the 20th century, Larson's masterful biography is a revelatory portrait of a pioneering quintet who went on search of nomadic reindeer-herders who had never before seen a European woman or to work in the pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona or to live in the New Guinea interior with warriors who still made their weapons from wood and stone. Their travels were sensationalised in the press. These five women were not simply adventurers, they were intellectual pioneers, professional anthropologists who set out to study human cultural diversity as part of an academic community. On her return from Siberia, Maria Czaplicka was given a lectureship at Oxford, but she lost her job when the male lecturer she had replaced came home at the end of the war. Routledge married a man who shared her intellectual interests, but when their marriage fell apart, she had no recourse when he secured a High Court order to take control of her formidable assets. Anthropology offered all five women an escape and field work a temporary relief from the strictures of English society and in new cultures an opportunity to negotiate their own identity. 337pp, illus.