Chapman, Charlotte Gower, 1902-1982

Charlotte Gower Chapman, born Charlotte Day Gower,[1] 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.[2]

Chapman wrote an anthropological study titled Milocca: A Sicilian Village, which included a detailed account of daily life, traditions and even mysticism that would have been familiar to earlier generations of Sicilians but was about to be inexorably changed by the events of the twentieth century.[3]