Isabel Crook

Isabel Brown was born on 15 December 1915, in Chengdu, Sichuan, to Canadian missionaries Homer and Muriel Brown. Homer was the dean of the Education Faculty at West China Union University. Muriel set up Montessori Schools in China and served on the board of the YWCA. Isabel's sisters, Muriel and Julia, were also born in Chengdu and all three attended the city's Canadian School. As a child, Isabel Brown became interested in anthropology and the many ethnic minorities in China. In 1939, at the age of 23, she graduated from Victoria College at the University of Toronto. After graduating, Brown returned to China and set out for western Sichuan with a Chinese colleague to study the Yi people (known then as Lolos) who followed a shamanic religion and lived in a caste-based society heavily reliant on slavery. The next year, the Chinese National Christian Council hired Brown to survey impoverished rural families in a village outside of Chongqing, which later became the basis for her publication Prosperity's Predicament.