Camilla Wedgwood
The Honourable Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood (
March 25 1901 Barlaston, England -
May 17 1955) was a British
anthropologist best known for research in the Pacific and her pioneering role as one of the
British Commonwealth's first female anthropologists.
Wedgwood's father was
Josiah Wedgwood IV. Her mother, Ethel Bowen Wedgwood, was the daughter of a Lord Justice of Appeal,
Charles Bowen. She was the great-great-great-granddaughter of the potter
Josiah Wedgwood.
She was raised, as Nancy Lutkehaus put it, "to be perfectly at ease conducting intelligent conversation when she happened to find
Gladstone and the
Archbishop of Canterbury guests at her father's dinner table". She was a well-known intellectual and liberated woman in the mold of
Virginia Woolf, and her parents were separated early on in her life and later divorced. Wedgwood attended Orme Girls' School in Staffordshire, and then studied English at
Bedford College and
Newnham College,
Cambridge.
It was at Cambridge that she studied under
Alfred Court Haddon, one of the most recognized anthropologists of the time. As a result she decided to become an anthropologist. One of her first tasks after graduation in
1926 was to edit the manuscript of
Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides for publication. She taught anthropology briefly at Bedford before moving to
Sydney University, where she took up a position in that institution's newly-founded department of anthropology in
1928. She also taught at the
University of Cape Town before returning to England in 1931 where she worked as a lecturer and personal assistant to
Bronislaw Malinowski at the
London School of Economics.
In
1932 Wedgwood received a grant from the Australian Research Council to conduct fieldwork on Manam Island off the north coast of
Papua New Guinea on the border of what are today Madang and East Sepik provinces. After her return from fieldwork she became involved in creating education policy for
Nauru and held a position as the principlan of the new women's college at the
University of Sydney. During
WWII she volunteered in Women's Services in the Australian army and was involved in formulating policy on education and administration in
Papua New Guinea.
After the war Wedgwood took a position at the
Australian School of Pacific Administration, which was responsible for training Australian colonial officers and administrators. She continued in this role until her death in
1955 of
lung cancer.
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Camilla : C.H. Wedgwood 1901-1955, a Life. 1990. By D. Wetherell and C. Carr-Gregg. Kensington, N.S.W. : New South Wales University Press.
She was Very Cambridge: Camilla Wedgwood and the History of Women in British Anthropology. 1986. By Nancy Lutkehaus. American Ethnologist 13(4):776-98.
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Finding guide for Wedgwood's Papers in the
National Library of Australia
