In 1926, Dorothy worked for Glacier National Park, north America, and married I. A. Richards on Honolulu in December 1926. In 1928, she, her husband and two guides successfully climbed the Dent Blanche in the Alps by its dangerous north ridge, the first ascent. For a while she became famous and was commissioned to write a book, Climbing Days, published in 1935. Her family was troubled by both her mother’s and her sister’s mental illness. The Richards went to live in China in 1929.
Dorothy Pilley grew up in a strict middle-class home where women were expected to prepare for marriage and little else. Frustrated and depressed by these restrictions, it was by chance she discovered the mountains during a holiday to Snowdonia in Wales, during the First World War. It was a life-changing experience and from then on she devoted her life to climbing and the mountains. Frustrated by the sexist attitudes of the all-male Alpine Club, she and other women formed the first feminist rock-climbing club, the Pinnacle Club, in 1921. Torn between love and the interwar restrictions marriage placed on women, she fled England for Canada and embarked on a record-breaking series of ascents.
When Ethel Gallimore was widowed just over a year after getting married, she became ill with grief. Only walking in the Peak District near her home in Sheffield saved her. In 1924 she formed a local conservation committee, to protect the Peak District from development, which would later become the Sheffield and Peak branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE). She and other ramblers also campaigned for wider public access to the forbidden moorlands of Kinder Scout, Bleaklow and other privately owned grouse-shooting estates. In 1927 her committee raised enough money to buy part of the Longshaw Estate, and handed the deeds over to the National Trust. In the early 1930s she began her campaign to have the Peak District included in the areas of land considered for designation as National Parks. When the Addiston Committee’s report into National Parks was published in 1931 she was disappointed to see the Peak District was not among the primary list of favoured areas, such as the Lake District and Snowdonia.
During the Second World War, Ethel, now Mrs Gerald Haythornthwaite, was seconded to work in the CPRE’s head office, where she worked on the plans for the creation of National Parks. She sat on the Hobhouse Committee, which recommended the Peak District should be a National Park. It was the first National Park, officially designated in April 1951 in the dying days of Clement Attlee’s government. She still had to fight motorways, racing circuits, developments and littering ramblers.
Ethel Haythornthwaite continued working for the Peak District, in an informal capacity, until her final days. The Peak District was successful in terms of negotiating access for walkers and ramblers across previously private moorland. Wangari Maathai became an MP in 2002, and in 2004 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Green Belt Movement planted more than 30 million trees. Wildlife has returned to the Karura Forest and Kenya’s tree cover has increased from less than 2 per cent, to more than 12 per cent of the land mass.
Evelyn Cheesman, born and brought up in rural Kent, nurtured her passion for nature, and in particular, insects, during her childhood. Denied the opportunity to study as a vet because of her sex, she became, in 1917, the first female Keeper of Insects at the Zoological Society of London (London Zoo). In 1920 she was promoted to Curator of Insects and joined a scientific expedition to the south Pacific which would begin a lifetime of collecting and entomological research. She visited Gorgona, the Galapagos, the Society Islands and the Marquesas. She left the expedition on Tahiti, the farthest point from home, and continued her researches alone, in a leaky hut by the side of a lagoon.
Evelyn Cheesman spent most of the 1920s and 1930s travelling and collecting in the south Pacific. She left London Zoo and began working as an unpaid volunteer at the Natural History Museum. On Malekula, New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Papua New Guinea, she began refining her theories on the movement of insects, which contributed to our understanding of the movement of continents in the ancient past. She began making radio programmes and on one, in 1956, she met a young Gerald Durrell and David Attenborough, who remembered being rather in awe of her. During the Second World War she worked for naval intelligence, drawing maps of islands in the Pacific.
Why is it that in myth, and reality, women’s presence in wild nature has been controlled, limited and, in some cultures, forbidden by men? Since the very first story ever written down, the Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed on tablets thousands of years ago, stories imagine the wild as a site of men’s heroic myth making whereas women are kept behind the city’s thick walls. Only monstrous, transgressive or supernatural women are found in the wild, to be feared, or consulted, or punished. In reality, practices such as Purdah, and foot-binding, chaperoning and religious banishment of women from sacred places, as well as practical constraints such as restrictive clothing, have all conspired to limit women’s presence in the wild and keep them bound to the hearth and home. Nineteenth-century western science only reinforced ideas of women’s helplessness and intellectual inadequacy. When women, like Mary Kingsley, did travel and explore, their narratives were very different from the masculine ideal of man-versus-nature, the hero that must conquer often feminine landscapes in order to reach his true self. The five women subjects of this book represent five different phases of our modern encounters with the wild, from exploration, to scientific research, to sport and leisure, and latterly, to conservation and rewilding, as we begin to understand the damage we have done to this fragile planet.
Mina Hubbard successfully completed her expedition from North West River to Ungava Bay in the early autumn of 1905. On her return, she wrote a book of her travels, A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador, and embarked on a book tour to London. She still faced criticism and questioning, particularly in New York. Her map of northern Labrador tells the story of both her and her husband’s journeys into the wilderness. It also shows evidence of First Nation American portage routes and settlements. After her book was published in 1908, she remarried and became Mrs Harold Ellis.
When Mina Hubbard’s husband Leonidas died while attempting to map the route of the Naskaupi River in northern Labrador in 1903, his widow, Mina, decided to try to finish his work. In the summer of 1905 she set off, with four Native American and mixed-race guides, in two canoes, starting at the North West River trading post. As a woman her presence in the Labrador ‘wild’ was highly contested and the New York ‘outdoors’ magazines criticised her and questioned her motives. Her private diary of her journey reveals the peaceful delight she found in the wilderness, removed from the expectations and restrictions of so-called ‘civilised’ society.