There are just a few days left to catch Intrepid Women: Fieldwork in Action 1910-1957 at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
The exhibition, which runs until 11 March, focuses on six of the museum’s most important female collectors and their fieldwork carried out between 1910 and the late 1950s. It is a unique opportunity to see objects and photographs resulting from their travels, as well as original archival material and film on display for the first time.
Why intrepid? The six ‘intrepid women’ featured in this exhibition undertook groundbreaking fieldwork between 1910 and 1957. All defied conventions for women: some graduated as Oxford-trained anthropologists in a male-dominated academic discipline; all travelled into places ‘ladies’ didn’t go; all lived with people from very different cultures to learn from them.
All of the women included in this exhibition have left important legacies of object and photograph collections, personal writings and publications - from the anthropologist Barbara Freire-Marreco, who meticulously documented the material from her fieldwork in North America, to Elsie McDougall, who lived among local communities in Mexico and collected textiles, looms and tools used for weaving, spinning and dyeing.
You can find out more about the Intrepid Women exhibition on the Pitt Rivers website. And you can hear Julia Nicholson, one of the exhibition curators, talking about Intrepid Women on BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour.
