The Sabbatical Report - Feathers

 My research during the next six months is for a book I am writing with a working title of "Feathers". The word is significant because all of the women I am writing about had feathered nests, in other words, enough money to allow them to pursue the things that interested them. These were women who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century whose families allowed and encouraged their intellectual work. They worked alongside men, sometimes husbands but often not,  and ultimately their names were associated with some of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, such as Einstein, Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and lesser known but important reforming intellectuals such as Cornford and Popper.

Court Leys, Oxford, the home of Brenda Seligman whose independent wealth  funded some of the earliest anthropological work in Papua-New Guinea and Australia. She grew iris here and entertained Malinowski.

 Doing this kind of research straightens out my thinking, because like most people I have absorbed Downton Abbey as a kind of arbiter of all things early 20th Century England. Few people lived like that, and although my research subjects had lovely homes and a few servants, they were middle class people without aspirations relating to money and class. Some of them had inherited enough from the Salaman ostrich feather fortune (feathers again!) to never need to worry about work, but they chose to work very hard and made significant contributions to their communities and the academies. None of them lived the lives of the rich and famous. The Salamans were smart with money, and knowing ostrich feathers might go the way of Dutch tulips, they had a huge property investment portfolio in London, which kept about 40 descendants in groceries for more than 50 years.