She argued in reports submitted to the government that all cultures which were part of the greater single society of South Africa had intrinsic value and that no race was superior.

She espoused protection of fundamental principles such as equal opportunity without conditions of race and colour, supporting freedom of conscience and expression and the rule of law for all Africans.

Soon after her birth, attracted by the Witwatersrand gold discoveries, her father relocated the family to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he worked as a surveyor and miner.

When she turned down the selection committee's offer of an unpaid lectureship,[14] she was awarded the college's Croll Scholarship to enable research among the Khoekhoe people.

[16][19] The couple married in Oxford and in April 1914, moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where Alfred had taken a post as a philosophy professor and chair at Harvard University.

[12][19] Their only child, Alwin, was born in 1915 and Hoernlé spent most of her time in the United States in domestic pursuits, although she did contribute an article "Certain Rites of Transition and Conception of !Nau among the Hottentots" to the journal Harvard African Studies[19][20] in 1918.

[19][23] While planning an expedition to South West Africa for December 1922, the month before her departure, she met Radcliffe-Brown, who encouraged her to abandon physical examination of her subjects and focus on collecting data relating to kinship.

Hired in 1923,[25][28] Hoernlé and Radcliffe-Brown's correspondence confirms that they were working until 1924 on several joint papers, covering ancestry and marriage rites, cattle, joking relationships, kinship terms, and sacrificial rituals.

[29] Radcliffe-Brown's decision to accept a position at the University of Sydney as head of the social anthropology department in 1925,[30] led Hoernlé to abandon her field research in favour of teaching.

Her views and those of her students who followed her lead were increasingly at odds with Afrikaner anthropologists and the later apartheid government, who accepted a static, primitivist model of traditional cultures.

Dora Earthy, a missionary in Mozambique, wrote a unique monograph focused solely on Valenge women, but other students incorporated information on female rituals within the family into their works, including initiation rites and those associated with marriage and conjugal relations.

[34] In addition to her focus on building an anthropological department, to facilitate her students' studies, Hoernlé created a library and an archaeological specimen and cultural museum.

[28][35] To provide them with a thorough grounding, she sent her best students to the London School of Economics to study ethnographic field work methods and functionalism with Bronisław Malinowski.

[41][42] That year, Bantu Studies dedicated their September 1935 issue as a "homage to Winifred Hoernlé"[1][43] and she was granted the unusual distinction of being "made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute".

[25] By 1932, when she joined the Committee of the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society, Hoernlé had developed not only a commitment to justice, but a sense of responsibility for social service.

[11] Rapid industrialization and urbanization in the 1930s and 1940s challenged the existing systems of legal jurisdiction in South Africa, which had formerly allowed rural people to indirectly govern themselves.

[2] Hoernlé was one of the most prominent activists of the period in social welfare campaigns, stressing the need for collaboration between African, Indian and white women.

[1] In 1923, Hoernlé wrote that to be successful in implementing change and European-style administration among traditional populations, officials needed "a sound knowledge of the outlook and beliefs of the natives".

[55] In her 1948 article, Alternatives to Apartheid, Hoernlé argued that any solution implemented to control racial relations must protect fundamental principles such as equal opportunity without conditions of race and colour, freedom of conscience and expression, and in accordance with the rule of law.

[56] By implementing such a plan, she reasoned societies could develop separate but equal institutions and customs which allowed each group to govern themselves and share the fundamental tenets of citizenship.

[57] However, Hoernlé reiterated that the test of commitment to basic rights was to recognize that they applied to people who had previously followed different traditions, but were now members of a society that had such principles.

[61] Letters from Radcliffe-Brown make it clear that Hoernlé's work was original scholarship[62] and though she and Alfred were both liberals, her ideas on social reforms differed from his and predated her relationship with him.

[31][62] The historian Andrew Bank, of the University of the Western Cape has referred to her as the central figure in the development of social anthropology in South Africa in the interwar period, as she introduced a collaborative "series of methodological innovations that led to the creation of a professional, scientific, and... field-based ethnographic tradition".

[63] Coupled with her influence on the students she taught and mentored, including Max Gluckman, Ellen Hellmann, Eileen Krige, Hilda Kuper, Audrey Richards, and Monica Wilson, she shaped the field of social anthropology in South Africa.