I will present my analysis of the biographies and creative production of Maria Czaplicka and Alicja Iwańska to show how these imaginative women from periphery managed to get some space in British and American academia, paying high prize for this. Both women deserve attention. Czaplicka for her theorizing about shamanism and gender, her expedition to Siberia in 1914-5, her travelogue, which can be seen as one of first reflexive descriptions of fieldwork, her political engagement in the independence of Poland, and in the international suffrage movement. But there were also dubious issues in her activity: mainly racial discourse (typical of the time). Alicja Iwańska, trained in philosophy in Poland and in sociology in the U.S., conducted intensive fieldwork in Mexico in 1960s, under the auspices of Sol Tax. She wrote an ethnographic novel about her fieldwork in Polish in 1968 and other literary texts. Her academic works were in English. This language duality stresses stylistic duality of her output. As it has been typical for a traditional history of anthropology, both women were almost totally forgotten. The format of world anthropology and feminist re-reading of predecessors make it possible to include important contributions of women (from peripheries) into the cannon of the discipline. I am following Sally Cole in her critical feminist history of anthropology, that entails rethinking the theory, unearthing overlooked positions by rereading women’s anthropological writing. I propose a format of an anthropological biography (focus on the production of knowledge, multiple contextualisation, theoretical impact).