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Stalking the Female Geographer
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10527 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1986 |
1,772 Words |
| Author
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Eloise Engle
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WOMEN OF THE FOUR WINDS
The Adventures of Four of
America's First Women Explorers
Elizabeth Fagg Olds
Houghton Mifflin, 1985
318 pp., $17.95 (cloth), $8.95 (paper)
What may appear on the surface as yet another strident attack on male dominance by feminists, this book is an "everyperson's" story of courage, skill, kindness and determination to succeed--in spite of age, fashion, expected behavior, and the serious perils of exploring unknown regions. The four Victorian women selected by author Elizabeth Fagg Olds were explorers of serious intent. Their goal was to enlighten the world with scientific observations, and to contribute to the world's permanent store of knowledge.
They explored at the risk of life and limb, chronicled their observations, and in 1925 founded the Society of Woman Geographers, a group sharing a common goal of professionalism. Author Elizabeth Fagg Olds draws on her membership, association, and experience as international president of the Society of 500 members to bring intimate details and insight into the lives of the women she portrays. There is a rich lode from which to draw, of course…famous names past and present. The SWG flag flies only on "firsts," and has gone out 30 times in science and exploration. It flew with Amelia Earhart on her last flight. It went with Margaret Mead into Bali and New Guinea. Jackie Ronne took it with her to the Antarctic (the first woman explorer to stay the winter). It went with Mary Livingston Ripley to India and with Eugenie Clark to the depths of the Red Sea. Most recently, the flag orbited in space as astronaut Kathryn Sullivan performed her extra-vehicular activities.
Olds has selected her subjects from a period that is quite muddy in most of our minds. We think of those women of the early 1900s as doing their needlework and tending the hearth. In her introduction, Olds points out that there were a number of "traveling ladies," who undertook journeys into remote, often dangerous hinterlands, enduring physical hardship and wretched travel conditions. She cites Alexine Tinne, the beautiful Dutch heiress who in the later decades of the 19th century took two expeditions up the Nile in search of the river's source, only to be murdered in the Sahara. She recalls the English-woman who trekked across Siberia to study exiled lepers in the Yukutsk region; Lady Ann Blunt, Lord Byron's granddaughter, the first Western woman to visit the Nejd region of Saudi Arabia, where she faced spear-wielding natives; Ida Laura Pfeiffer, who twice circled the globe in the mid-nineteenth century, dying of a fever on the island of Madagascar, and Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of William Pitt, who settled among the Druses in a fortified convent in the Levant, adopted Eastern dress and religion, and became a prophetess. The author also reminds us of the British traveler Isabella Bird Bishop, who visited central Asia, the Orient, the Hawaiian Islands and the American West, writing nine travel books and becoming the first woman elected to Great Britain's prestigious Royal Geographical Society.
With these tidbits as teasers, Olds tells us about the new women travelers who were largely Americans. It must have been an agonizing decision, but she wisely selected four women who were quite different in personality and
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