Smith was born in
New York City in 1907. When she was three years old, she contracted polio which left her with a paralysed leg. She gained her doctorate and was the last student of
Frank Boas. In 1940 she published
The Puyallup-Nisqually. The
Nisqually and
Puyallup peoples are Native Americans based in Washington State. She rose to take leading positions in the
American Folklore Society and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Before she was forty, she became the President of the
American Ethnological Society. In 1952, she moved to the UK and married
H. Farrant Akehurst. In 1956, she began teaching part-time in the Anthropology Department of the
London School of Economics. In 1958, she worked with the
Rivers Memorial Medal winner
Brenda Seligman to create the
Royal Anthropological Institute's endowment fund. The fund was able to bankroll various symposia including ones on the artist in tribal society, the domestication of cattle, and race relations. Smith first had symptoms of her illness in 1949 and died in
New York in 1961. ==References==