Alice Thorner
Alice Thorner was a Latvian-born social scientist and statistician whose main research effort was partly devoted to the role assigned to women in the Indian society.
Early years
Alice Ginsburg was born in present-day Latvia in 1917. Her family emigrated to the US, and she earned a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1937. For her graduate studies she entered Columbia University, where she met her future husband and co-worker Daniel Thorner, before graduating with an M.A. in social psychology in 1941. A member of her family may have turned her maiden name into Gaines due to the rise of American antisemitism in the thirties.Move to England
A stay in London, partly funded by a doctoral fellowship of her husband, may have been the begin of several long-lasting friendships with Indian social scientists, like P N Haksarand Trivedi who would later greet her on a yearly basis in the country she enjoyed studying and played a key role in a shift towards a more left-wing view of society.
Stay in India
A so-called witchhunt against some scientists that did not entirely reject some ideas described in part of the writings due to a soviet agrarian economist named Alexander V. Chayanov associated to a husband refusal to testify against some friends they met in London lead to several grant losses and was associated to an American passport withdrawal and significantly darkened university career prospects for both. A long stay in India that had been planned before begun in spite of these difficulties.Thorner significantly contributed to updating a method of accounting for various categories of working women in later census as a consultant for the Indian government. A book entitled Land and Labour in India was later co-authored with her husband as a summary of a relatively fruitful study of an India society.