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List of the most influential female people in Anthropology,

#1051

Diane Barwick

1938 - 1986 (48 years)

Diane Elizabeth McEachern Barwick was a Canadian-born anthropologist, historian, and Aboriginal-rights activist. She was also a renowned researcher and teacher in the field of Australian Aboriginal culture and society.

#1052

Alison Hingston Quiggin

1874 - 1971 (97 years)

Alison Hingston Quiggin was a British anthropologist at the University of Cambridge and the author of the much reprinted A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency . Education and career Hingston studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1899 to 1902. She went on to become a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University.

#1053

Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

1863 - 1944 (81 years)

Katharine Elizabeth Dopp was one of the foremost American educators at the turn of the 20th century, and one of the first to advocate the involvement of business in education. She wrote a series of textbooks on anthropology and economics which were widely used in the public schools of Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, as well as nationally circulated studies on the same subjects, and children's books.

#1054

Dorothy Keur

1904 - 1989 (85 years)

Dorothy L. Keur was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in Navajo and Netherlands cultures. She was a professor at Hunter College and was the president of the American Ethnological Society from 1974 to 1979.

#1055

Winifred Needler

1904 - 1987 (83 years)

Winifred Needler DCL was a German-born Canadian Egyptologist at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, where she rose to be keeper of the Near Eastern Collections and later curator of the Egyptian Department. She also taught at the University of Toronto.

#1056

Vera Mae Green

1928 - 1982 (54 years)

Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to...

#1057

Harriet Boyd Hawes

1871 - 1945 (74 years)

Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes was a pioneering American archaeologist, nurse, relief worker, and professor. She is best known as the discoverer and first director of Gournia, one of the first archaeological excavations to uncover a Minoan settlement and palace on the Aegean island of Crete. She was also the second person to have the honor of the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship bestowed upon her, and the very first female archeologist to speak at the Archaeological Institute of America.

#1058

Alice Braunlich

1888 - 1989 (101 years)

Alice Freda Braunlich was an American classical philologist. Life Braunlich was born to parents of German extraction, Emilie Hedwig Hoering Braunlich and the physician Henry Uchtorf Braunlich, in Davenport, Iowa on February 1, 1888. Her father's income made it possible for Alice to study at the University of Chicago, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in 1908 and a master's degree in 1909. From 1912 to 1914 she worked as an assistant for William Gardner Hale, professor of Latin. In 1913 she received her Ph.D., with a dissertation on indirect questions in the indicative mood.

#1059

Eva Verbitsky Hunt

1934 - 1980 (46 years)

Muriel Eva Verbitsky de Hunt was an Argentine cultural anthropologist, academic and writer who moved to the United States in the late 1950s. She is remembered for her contributions to symbolic anthropology and ethnohistory. Together with her husband Robert Hunt, she performed innovative regional work in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the 1960s.

#1060

Ella Kivikoski

1901 - 1990 (89 years)

Ella Margareta Kivikoski was the first Finnish female to earn a doctorate in archaeology in Finland. In 1931, she studied at the Baltic Institute in Stockholm and developed a scholarly working relationship with the Estonian archaeologist Harri Moora. She was a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki from 1948 until 1969, specializing in both Finnish and Nordic archaeology. Her specialty was the Finnish Iron Age.

#1061

Clairève Grandjouan

1929 - 1982 (53 years)

Clairève or Claireve Grandjouan was a French-born American archaeologist. She had a B.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. After working on excavations in Athens, she became General Secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America and editor of its Bulletin, while teaching at New York University . She then taught at Hunter College from 1968, becoming chairman of classical and Oriental studies in 1968 and full professor in 1981.

#1062

Dorothy Lamb

1887 - 1967 (80 years)

Lady Brooke Nicholson, , better known by her maiden name Dorothy Lamb, was a British archaeologist and writer known for her catalogue of terracotta in the Acropolis Museum, Athens and her work in Mediterranean field archaeology.

#1063

Isabelle Raubitschek

1914 - 1988 (74 years)

Isabelle Kelly Raubitschek was an American art historian, archaeologist, and professor of art at Stanford University. Biography Raubitschek was born in Boston, and was the oldest of three children. She began to study foreign languages as a child, eventually becoming fluent in Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German. She met and studied with the art historian, Margarete Bieber, when she attended Barnard College in 1935. While at Barnard, she received the Lucille Pulitzer scholarship, which provided finances for four full years of study. She continued her graduate education at Columbia University and in 1936 went to the Institute of Art and Archaeology at Sorbonne.

#1064

Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth

1905 - 1969 (64 years)

Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth was an archaeologist and art history and classical studies professor. She studied at Vassar and received her doctorate at Radcliffe. In addition to her research contributions to the classics, she also bridged her interest to contemporary art and architecture. Her grandfather was Henry van Ingen.

#1065

Mary Belle McElwain

1874 - 1964 (90 years)

Mary Belle McElwain was an American classical scholar. Biography McElwain gained her BA from Wilson College in 1895. She subsequently taught Greek, English, and maths at the college until 1903. After teaching at a finishing school at Bryn Mawr until 1908 McElwain gained a MA from Cornell University in 1909 with a thesis titled "The Life of the Empress Livia Based on Latin and Greek Sources" and her PhD in 1910 on "The use of the imperative in Plautus". In 1936 she was awarded an honorary Litt. D. from Wilson College.

#1066

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston

1891 - 1960 (69 years)

Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.

#1067

Lucy Mair

1901 - 1986 (85 years)

Lucy Philip Mair was a British anthropologist. She wrote on the subject of social organization, and contributed to the involvement of anthropological research in governance and politics. Her work on colonial administration was influential.

#1068

Elsie Clews Parsons

Elsie Clews Parsons

1875 - 1941 (66 years)

Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School. She was associate editor for The Journal of American Folklore , president of the American Folklore Society , president of the American Ethnological Society , and was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association right before her death.

#1069

Lorna Marshall

1898 - 2002 (104 years)

Lorna Marshall was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert. Background Marshall was born in Morenci, Arizona territory. She married Laurence Kennedy Marshall in 1926; they had a daughter Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and a son John Kennedy Marshall . Marshall received a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley in 1921 and an MA from Radcliffe College in 1928, and before 1926 worked as an English instructor at Mount Holyoke. Later she took anthropology courses at Harvard University and had a second career as an ethnographer.

#1070

Margaret Read

1889 - 1991 (102 years)

Margaret Helen Read, CBE was a British social anthropologist and academic, who specialised in colonial education. She was one of the first researchers to apply social anthropology and ethnography principles to the education and health problems of people living in the British colonies.

#1071

Gene Weltfish

1902 - 1980 (78 years)

Gene Weltfish was an American anthropologist and historian working at Columbia University from 1928 to 1953. She had studied with Franz Boas and was a specialist in the culture and history of the Pawnee people of the Midwest Plains. Her 1965 ethnography, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, is considered the authoritative work on Pawnee culture to this day.

#1072

Monica Wilson

1908 - 1982 (74 years)

Monica Wilson, née Hunter was a South African anthropologist, who was professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Life Monica Hunter was born to missionary parents in Lovedale in the Cape Colony, speaking Xhosa from childhood. She studied history at Girton College, Cambridge, before gaining a Cambridge doctorate in anthropology in 1934. Her thesis, the fieldwork for which was undertaken with the Pondo in the Eastern Cape between 1931 and 1933, was presented in the monograph Reaction to Conquest.

#1073

Esther Schiff Goldfrank

1896 - 1997 (101 years)

Esther Schiff Goldfrank was an American anthropologist of the famous German-American Schiff family. She had studied with Franz Boas and specialized in the Pueblo Indians. She worked closely with Elsie Clews Parsons and also with Ruth Benedict on the Blackfoot. She published on Pueblo religion, Cochiti sociology and Isleta drawings. Goldfrank received her bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1918 and graduated from Columbia University in 1937.

#1074

Charlotte Gower Chapman

Charlotte Gower Chapman

1902 - 1982 (80 years)

Charlotte Gower Chapman, born Charlotte Day Gower, was an ethnologist and an author. In 1928, she received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Later on while working at Lingnan University in China during World War II she was taken prisoner by the Japanese when the US entered the war, but was released by 1942. After, she joined the United States Marine Corps and worked in the Office of Strategic Services until 1947 when she became an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency until her retirement in 1964.

#1075

Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa

Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa

1885 - 1967 (82 years)

Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa, or Cezaria Anna Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz-Jędrzejewiczowa, was a Polish scientist, art historian, and anthropologist. She was one of the pioneers of ethnology in Poland and one of the first scientists to adopt phenomenology in studies of folk culture.

#1076

Camilla Wedgwood

1901 - 1955 (54 years)

Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood was a British anthropologist and academic administrator. She is best known for her research in the Pacific and her pioneering role as one of the British Commonwealth's first female anthropologists.

#1077

Caroline Bond Day

Caroline Bond Day

1889 - 1948 (59 years)

Caroline Stewart Bond Day was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology. Day is recognized as a pioneer physical anthropologist whose study helped future black researchers and is used to challenge scientific racism about miscegenation.

#1078

Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray

1863 - 1963 (100 years)

Margaret Alice Murray was a British-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist who was born in India. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London from 1898 to 1935. She served as president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely over the course of her career.

#1079

Dorothy D. Lee

1905 - 1975 (70 years)

Dorothy Demetracopolou Lee was an American anthropologist, author and philosopher of cultural anthropology. Born in Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, she was Greek by birth and was educated, married, and raised her four children in the U.S. Her husband was American philosopher Otis Hamilton Lee . Her children were Anna Maud Lee, Mary H. Lee, Ronald and Sabra.

#1080

Annie Smith Peck

Annie Smith Peck

1850 - 1935 (85 years)

Annie Smith Peck was an American mountaineer and adventurer. The northern peak of the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca mountain chain, Huascarán was named Cumbre Aña Peck in Peck's honor. She was an ardent suffragist and noted speaker. She lectured extensively for many years throughout the world, and wrote four books encouraging travel and exploration.

#1081

Gisela Richter

1882 - 1972 (90 years)

Gisela Marie Augusta Richter was a British-American classical archaeologist and art historian. She was a prominent figure and an authority in her field. Early life Gisela Richter was born in London, England, the daughter of Jean Paul and Louise Richter. Both of her parents and her sister, Irma, were art historians specialised in Italian Renaissance. Richter was educated at Maida Vale School, one of the finest schools for women at the time. She decided to become a classical archaeologist while attending Emmanuel Loewy's lectures at the University of Rome around 1896. In 1901, she began attending Girton College at the University of Cambridge.

#1082

Johanna Mestorf

Johanna Mestorf

1828 - 1909 (81 years)

Johanna Mestorf was a German prehistoric archaeologist, the first female museum director in the Kingdom of Prussia and usually said to be the first female professor in Germany. Life and career Johanna was the youngest of four surviving children of the physician and antiquarian Jacob Heinrich Mestorf and his wife Sophia Katharina Georgine, née Körner. When he died in 1837, she moved with her mother to Itzehoe, where she attended the Blöcker Institute upper school for girls. In 1849 she went to Sweden as a governess to the family of Count Piper at Ängsö Castle, and there also studied Scandinavian languages.

#1083

Martha Warren Beckwith

1871 - 1959 (88 years)

Martha Warren Beckwith was an American folklorist and ethnographer who was the first chair in folklore at any university or college in the U.S. Early life and education Beckwith was born in Wellesley Heights, Massachusetts to George Ely and Harriet Winslow Beckwith, both schoolteachers, before the family moved to Maui, Hawaii, where they had relatives descended from early missionaries. There, Beckwith made friends with many locals including members of the wealthy Alexander family who later sponsored her folklore work, and she developed an early interest in Hawaiian folk dancing.

#1084

Barbara E. Ward

1919 - 1983 (64 years)

Barbara E. Ward was a British social anthropologist and academic, who specialised in Chinese society. Life Ward was born in 1919. She studied history at Newnham College, an all-women's college of the University of Cambridge. She then attended the University of London, where she gained a diploma in education in 1942. For the next five years she taught in England and West Africa. While teaching in Ghana, she became interested in social anthropology. In 1949, she completed a master's degree from the London School of Economics having studied the Ewe speaking people of Ghana.

#1085

Hilda Petrie

1871 - 1956 (85 years)

Hilda Mary Isabel, Lady Petrie , was an Irish-born British Egyptologist and wife of Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology. Having studied geology, she was hired by Flinders Petrie at age 25 as an artist, which led to their marriage and a working partnership that endured for their lifetimes.

#1086

Ida Halpern

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Ida Halpern was a Canadian ethnomusicologist. Halpern was born in Vienna, Austria. She arrived in Canada in order to flee Nazism in her native country, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1944. She worked among Native Americans of coastal British Columbia during the mid-20th century, collecting, recording, and transcribing their music and documenting its use in their cultures. Many of these recordings were released as LPss, with extensive liner notes and transcriptions. More recently, her collection has also been released digitally.

#1087

Gertrude Bell

1868 - 1926 (58 years)

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels. During her lifetime, she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials such as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia Percy Cox, giving her great influence. She participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the 1921 Cairo Conference, which help...

#1088

Isabel Kelly

1906 - 1982 (76 years)

Isabel Truesdell Kelly was an American anthropologist known for her work with the members of the Coast Miwok tribe, members of the Chemehuevi people in the 1920s and 1930s, and her work later in life as an archaeologist working in Sinaloa, Mexico. She was trained by anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber at the University of California, Berkeley.

#1089

Gitel Steed

1914 - 1977 (63 years)

Gitel Poznanski Steed was an American cultural anthropologist known for her research in India 1950–52 involving ethnological work in three villages to study the complex detail of their social structure. She supplemented her research with thousands of ethnological photographs of the individuals and groups studied, the quality of which was recognised by Edward Steichen. She experienced chronic illnesses after her return from the field, but nevertheless completed publications and many lectures but did not survive to finish a book The Human Career in Village India which was to integrate and uni...

#1090

Bertha Parker Pallan

Bertha Parker Pallan

1907 - 1978 (71 years)

Bertha Pallan Thurston Cody was an American archaeologist, working as an assistant in archaeology at the Southwest Museum. She was also married to actor Iron Eyes Cody. She is thought to be the first Native American female archaeologist, of Abenaki and Seneca descent.

#1091

Margaret Elizabeth Ashley-Towle

1902 - 1985 (83 years)

Margaret Elizabeth Ashley-Towle was possibly the earliest professional woman in Southeast archaeology. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Claude Lordawick Ashley, a chief of the Atlanta city council, and Elizabeth Miller, the daughter of Captain Hiram Miller, a veteran of the Federal army.

#1092

Michela Schiff Giorgini

1923 - 1978 (55 years)

Michela Schiff Giorgini née Beomonte was an Italian archaeologist who is remembered for her extensive work in today's Sudan at Soleb on the River Nile where from 1957 she conducted excavations of the Temple of Amenhotep III. During the 20 years she spent in the area, she went on to investigate the temple of Queen Tiye at Sedeinga, and the tomb of Taharqa at Nuri. The Michela Schiff Giorgini Foundation was established in 1984 to preserve her memory and promote Egyptology. Her research is well documented in her many books and publications, beginning with Soleb: Volume 1 in 1965.

#1093

Bronwyn Fredericks

Bronwyn Fredericks is an Indigenous Australian academic and administrator. Her scholarship extends across education, health, community development, policy, and Indigenist research methods, including a focus on work relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people using participatory and community led approaches. Her contributions have been recognised through the NAIDOC Education Award in 2022 and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Award in 2019. She is currently the Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Queensland.

#1094

Elli Köngäs-Maranda

1932 - 1982 (50 years)

Elli-Kaija Köngäs-Maranda was an internationally renowned anthropologist and feminist folklorist. She studied Finnish language and folklore at the University of Helsinki, where she received her B.A. in 1954 and her M.A. in 1955. She continued her studies in the United States of America and did her doctoral dissertation in 1963 at Indiana University. She was a lecturer at Columbia University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University. Köngäs-Maranda was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. The Society's Women's section inaugurated 1983 two prizes in her memory.

#1095

Jole Bovio Marconi

1897 - 1986 (89 years)

Jole Bovio Marconi was an Italian archaeologist who graduated with a degree in the topography of ancient Rome from the Sapienza University of Rome and specialized at the Italian School of Archaeology at Athens. She married her colleague Pirro Marconi, whom she met in her studies in Athens.

#1096

Elizabeth Pierce Blegen

Elizabeth Pierce Blegen

1888 - 1966 (78 years)

Elizabeth Denny Pierce Blegen was an American archaeologist, educator and writer. She excavated at sites in Greece and Cyprus, contributed reports on archaeological discoveries in Greece to the American Journal of Archaeology from 1925 to 1952, and was involved in several organisations promoting women's professional advancement in Greece and the United States.

#1097

Jodi Byrd

Jodi Byrd holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. (2002) in English literature from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation was Colonialism’s Cacophony: Natives and Arrivants at the Limits of Postcolonial Theory. Before moving to Cornell University, she taught at the University of Illinois Chicago, and before that she was an assistant professor of indigenous politics in the department of political science of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was formerly associated with the American Indian Studies Program at Illinois. She was president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for 2011–2012.

#1098

Alice Kober

1906 - 1950 (44 years)

Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B. Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death. In the 1940s, she published three major papers on the script, demonstrating evidence of inflection; her discovery allowed for the deduction of phonetic relationships between different signs without assigning them phonetic values, and would be a key step in the eventual decipherment of the script.

#1099

Luisa Banti

1894 - 1978 (84 years)

Luisa Banti was an Italian archaeologist, art historian, and educator specializing in the Etruscan and Minoan civilizations. Her best known work is Il mondo degli Etruschi . First published in 1960 and translated into several languages, it influenced scholarly opinion for many years and became a classic text.

#1100

Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw

1919 - 1983 (64 years)

Johanna Engelberta van Lohuizen-de Leeuw was a Dutch archaeologist and art historian, specializing in South and South-east Asia. Fluent in Sanskrit, she contributed important research to the study of antiquities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as in Thailand and Indonesia. Along with Raymond and Bridget Allchin, Jan van Lohuizen, and Harold Bailey, she founded the Ancient and Indian Iran Trust in Cambridge in 1978 to support historical and archaeological research in those regions, which later became a center of academic research in the field. She made notable contributions to the history of Kusana art.

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