My friend Patricia Symonds, who has died aged 86, was a school dropout from Merseyside who went on to become a professor at an Ivy League university.
Pat was born in Liverpool to Walter Heard and his wife, Anita (nee Stenberg), who both worked in merchant shipping, and was brought up during the heavy bombing of the city during the second world war. She left school at 17 before she had matriculated.
In 1952 she married an American serviceman, Harrout Melikian, who was based for a time in Britain; they emigrated to the US, where they had three children.
After that marriage ended in divorce, Pat met Alan Symonds, head of the furniture fabric company Quaker Fabrics, who was a widower with three children. They all lived contentedly in Providence, Rhode Island, and spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where she often played tennis with her neighbour Walter Cronkite.
In her 40s, however, with her children growing up fast, Pat decided to finish her schooling and enrolled at Brown University in Providence to study social anthropology. Not satisfied with a bachelor’s degree, she took a master’s and then, after interviewing some recently arrived Hmong refugees in Providence, began a PhD.
Equipped with a notebook and a sharp mind, she embarked on two years of field research in a highland village in northern Thailand. She became fluent in Hmong, one of the hardest of all languages to master, and endured the discomfort of village life, where her pragmatic character shone through.
The result of her studies was an outstanding ethnography focused on the role of women in Hmong society, published as Calling in the Soul: Gender and the Cycle of Life in a Hmong Village. After completing her PhD, by now in her 50s, she joined the faculty of Brown University’s department of anthropology, where she taught until her retirement in 2009.
For all her inner resolve and focus, Pat was the kindest and most thoughtful of people. She made massive contributions to our understanding of Hmong life, inspired her students and gave support to her friends and other academics.
She is survived by Alan, their son, Alan Jr, two children from her first marriage, Karen and Debbie, and by three stepchildren, Stephen, Amy and Jane. A third child from her first marriage, Susan, predeceased her.
