One of my most vivid memories from childhood, is of my mother reading the Nordic folktale ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ to me. The tale, first collected in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century tells of a young girl who leaves her cottage, on the back of a polar bear, to rescue a prince trapped in a distant castle. On the back of this bear, she ranged the desolate mountain ridges of northern Norway, seeking advice from magical and supernatural creatures.
Raised, as so many young girls are, on tales of brave princes, huntsmen, herders and knights setting out from their city, village, or encampment on self-making quests, this story was like an electric shock. So girls could do it too, I remember thinking, we can face the wild, with its beauties and dangers. What a refreshing change from all those epic adventure stories, from Gilgamesh, to Ulysses, to the Kalevala, to King Arthur where the only females found in the wild are either supernatural or, if flesh-and-blood human, have in some way transgressed and are there to be punished, banished from society.
Controlling Women’s Mobility
This idea that women should not stray beyond the city wall, village paling or sheepfold is strong and resonates into modern times: Even today, the outdoors is a contested space for women: not just those dimly lit parks where women joggers wonder whose steps are behind them, but also in what is left of the wild. Women’s backpackers’ guides written as late as 1980 suggest that society still believes there is something unnatural about women in the wilderness, and that women fear they will undergo some grotesque transformation if they go there. The Backpacking Woman guide (1980), asserts: ‘Planted deep in most women’s psyches is the insidious question, by going outdoors will I lose my femininity?’ Another guide claims that outdoor woman means a ‘hearty’ voice and chapped lips. Modern US wilderness studies show that women (and also Black and Hispanic men) feel less safe than white men in the remote outdoors, and that they prefer places where there are obvious signs of law enforcement officers, rubbish bins and orientation boards with lists of rules.[i] Even in the remotest region of the planet, at the Antarctic research stations around the south Pole, women fieldworkers report sexual harassment and boorish behaviour intended to ‘other’, and exclude them, by the men at the bases.
There is much to unpack here, of course, with questions of what is the wild, and the division of labour in hunter-gatherer societies still living in our now vanishing ‘wild.’ Modern and historical studies suggest women’s range from camps and villages is far less than that of men and often their tasks consist of forest farming and catching small animals close to or within the camp boundaries, whereas men voyage further afield, often away for days and weeks, in search of big game prey.[ii]
My new book, Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Man’s World (MUP, March 2025), takes five women from across the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, and by studying their diaries, private letters, published memoirs and research, looks at their relationship with the ‘wild’. The book also examines responses to their journeying, scientific exploration, conservation work and rewilding and reveals continuing suspicion of mobile and environmentally active women.
‘Mrs Hubbard’s Strange Visit’
We might have expected that in 1905 the Canadian Mina Hubbard’s motivations for journeying 600 miles into Arctic Labrador with four Cree or mixed race guides would attract opprobrium – and it did, with headlines such as ‘Mrs Hubbard’s Strange Visit’ and (completely untrue) ‘Woman Explorer Gives Up’ splashed on New York newspaper front pages. Part of that suspicion rested upon her refusal to represent her journey to map the source of the Naskaupi River in traditional western imperialising narratives. Instead of an adverse terra incognita to be subdued, everything about Labrador charmed her, from the shining lakes, to the fragrance of the flowers. More importantly, for a traveller in northern Labrador, she noted, in her subsequent map, the many signs of First Nation presence: the portage routes around rapids, the food stores, fish weirs, hearths and burial sites.
We might have hoped that by the time Wangari Maathai was working in modern Kenya, in the 1980s, to plant 30 million trees to help prevent soil erosion, that women’s work in the wild would now be accepted and respected. However, because her replanting efforts, and her campaigns to save Kenya’s vanishing forests, brought her up against the vested interests of President Daniel arap Moi’s regime, she was vilified in the press and at one point MPs in Parliament put a curse on her. When she and other members of her Green Belt Movement tried to plant tree seedlings in Karura Forest near Nairobi, she was attacked and received a head injury. She signed her police statement in her own blood.[iii]
Dr Sarah Lonsdale is a lecturer in history and journalism at City, Saint George’s, University of London. Her next book, Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Man’s World is published by Manchester University Press in March 2025. Her previous book was Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020).
Top image credit: Cover of Wildly Different.
[i] Thomas, Lyn (1980). The Backpacking Woman. New York: Anchor Books. McNeil, Jamie, Harris, Deborah and Fondren, Kristi (2012). ‘Women and the Wild: Gender socialisation in wilderness recreation advertising.’ Gend. Issues 29 pp. 39-55; Nash, Meredith, Nielsen, Hanne, Shaw, Justine, King, Matt, Lea, Mary-Anne, Bax, Narissa (2019). ‘Antarctica just has this hero factor…’: Gendered Barriers to Australian Antarctic Research and fieldwork.’ PLoS ONE. 14/1 pp. 1-22
[ii] Grund, Brigid (2017). ‘Behavioural Ecology, Technology and the Organisation of Labor: How a shift from spear thrower to self bow exacerbates social disparities. American Anthropologist 119/1, pp. 104-119; Park, Claudia Mi Young, and Margherita Maffii (2017). ’We are not afraid to die: gender dynamics and agrarian change in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia.’ Journal of Peasant studies 44/6 pp. 1235-1254
[iii] References to Mina Hubbard and Wangari Maathai in Lonsdale, Sarah (2025). Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Man’s World. Manchester: Manchester University Press. The other three women featured in the book are the entomologist Evelyn Cheesman, the mountaineer Dorothy Pilley and the conservationist Ethel Haythornthwaite.
