Women's Anthropological Society

Women's Anthropological Society was a learned society formed in the late 19th century to advance anthropological study by and about women, linking the intellectual networks of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It convened fieldworkers, collectors, and writers who intersected with imperial circuits, museums, and universities, and contributed to debates alongside institutions such as the British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Ethnological Society. The Society operated amid contemporaneous organizations including the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Society of Antiquaries, and women's groups like the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

History

The Society emerged during the same period that figures such as Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, Millicent Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Harriet Martineau were reshaping public life, while intellectual peers included E. B. Tylor, Bronisław Malinowski, Franz Boas, Lewis Henry Morgan, and James Frazer. Its activities intersected with institutions like University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, British Museum (Natural History), and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and with colonial administrations in places such as British India, Gold Coast (British colony), Cape Colony, Australia (British colony), and New Zealand. Debates around method and theory involved correspondents linked to Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society, American Anthropological Association, Smithsonian Institution, and publications like Nature (journal), The Times, The Athenaeum (periodical), and The Nineteenth Century.

Founding and Key Figures

Founders and prominent members included travelers and writers comparable to Mary Kingsley, Margaret Murray, Isabella Bird, Gertrude Bell, and Katharine Murray Lyell; intellectual allies included historians and scientists such as John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, Talcott Parsons, Arnold Toynbee (merchant), A. C. Haddon, Edward Burnett Tylor, and Ruth Benedict. The Society drew on networks reaching Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Royal Holloway, University of London, King's College London, Girton College, Cambridge, and Somerville College, Oxford. Correspondence and collaboration extended to explorers and administrators like Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, Richard Francis Burton, Frederick Lugard, and H. H. Johnston as well as collectors linked to Pitt Rivers Museum, Horniman Museum, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and Field Museum.

Activities and Publications

The Society organized lectures, fieldwork training, museum exhibitions, and periodicals that paralleled journals such as Man (journal), Journal of the Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist, and Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. It published monographs, bulletins, and expedition reports that circulated among subscribers at British Museum, Royal Geographical Society, Wellcome Collection, Hunterian Museum, and libraries like British Library, Bodleian Library, Trinity College Library, Cambridge, and National Library of Scotland. Conferences featured speakers connected to Max Müller, Karl Pearson, Alfred Russell Wallace, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Raymond Firth. Collaborative projects linked to archaeological undertakings in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Mesoamerica, and Papua New Guinea with field notes deposited at Ashmolean Museum, British School at Athens, Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, and Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

Membership and Organization

Membership included women affiliated with universities and colonial administrations such as Elsie Clews Parsons, Zora Neale Hurston, Frances Densmore, Beatrice Potter Webb, Margaret Mead, and Bronislawa Dłuska; men participated as corresponding members linked to Alfred Cort Haddon, Siegfried Sassoon, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Julian Huxley, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Administrative ties connected the Society to funding sources like Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust, Andrew Carnegie philanthropy, and institutional partners including University College London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Imperial College London, and National Trust. Regional sections coordinated activities in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Belfast and maintained relationships with colonial offices in Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington, and Cape Town.

Impact and Legacy

The Society influenced museum curation at Pitt Rivers Museum, Horniman Museum, and British Museum, informed anthropological pedagogy at London School of Economics, Cambridge, and Oxford, and shaped gendered perspectives in ethnographic writing alongside thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Claudia Goldin, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Its archives—preserved in repositories such as British Library, Bodleian Library, Wellcome Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum Archive, and National Archives (United Kingdom)—have been mined by historians of science and gender including Thompson, E. P., Caroline Walker Bynum, Londa Schiebinger, Margaret Canovan, and Sally Shuttleworth. The Society's legacy appears in contemporary programs at Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, Smithsonian Institution, and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and in debates at conferences hosted by Royal Anthropological Institute, American Anthropological Association, and International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences.

Category:Learned societies