Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being – articulated by these ten pathfinding women. As part of a decade-long project to recreate the journeys of the first female explorers, with the aim of bringing their names out of obscurity, I chose to follow her path on foot, across the same mountain passes into northern Nubra, admiring the brightly coloured prayer flags that blew across the mountainous landscapes as she described in Amongst the Tibetans. Isabella’s footsteps led me over the steep Digar La Pass, she astride a yak and me on foot Absolutely. I wish male walker writers would open up about the massive privileges they enjoy. When Robert Macfarlane or other fathers go wandering, could they perhaps mention that someone else is doing the childcare? Because someone is, and it is obvious that they are, but somehow men's writing gets to be free of such markers of status, and taken to be universal. If you've the time, the body, the leisure, the money to be in the wild you're benefitting from privilege. It hasn't done us any good to ignore that – and it might open up adventure literature to other voices who don't benefit from all, or any, of those privileges. Author Kerri Andrews introduces us to ten of these women who walked “despite fear and derision.” In her introductory chapter Setting Off, she explains: The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’”(174).

I cross the burn, follow the lane a little south, wondering where Jessie would have found the next part of her descent. And there, between one burn and the next is a gate and a path marked by a scattered line of brown leaves, leading down between trees. It is unremarked on the map and delights me with the soft secrecy of its way. Here there is soprano birch leaf and the bronzy tenor of the first clusters of oak leaves.”The governess Ellen Weeton, "found herself frustrated in her ambitions [to walk all over Wales] by anxieties about the social propriety of being a solitary woman on the road". How much of an influence were social attitudes, and notions of feminine propriety, in dissuading Victorian women from walking? Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly circled the world faster than anyone ever had in 1890. She travelled alone, with just a Gladstone bag, and shattered the fictional 80-day record of Phileas Fogg , returning in 72 days after travelling 21,740 miles. The fearless globetrotter had achieved “the most remarkable of all feats of circumnavigation ever performed by a human being,” said the New York World, sponsor of her trip.

The social event of the year for outdoor people takes place across the town from17th-20th November. I’m trudging through a Saharan sandstorm. The wind is so loud I can’t hear Brahim, my guide, who is beside me at the head of our camels. Snot is coursing down my face and bubbling into my mouth under my chech (scarf), which is wound round my forehead and my chin to stop my skin being taken off by the sand. I have ski goggles to protect my eyes. It is so hot, I want to rip my ears off. Ears which are filled with grit and itching horribly from the inside. I am silently cursing Freya Stark, the British explorer born in the Victorian era, who journeyed all over the Middle East and is one of the reasons I am in this hell. I didn’t know when I started in January 2019 that I would be walking through the Covid pandemic As humans, walking defines us. We are the two-legged apes. We walk, and we talk. We are thinking minds – thinking in language, more often than not. The rhythms of our walking and of our thinking are one”(9). The status of women in 18th and 19th Century society was not enviable, and perhaps it's only to be expected that over time contemporary women walking, and writing about walking, became sidelined. But even today women seem less prominent in writing about nature and the outdoors, and we still see fewer books and articles by women. Is this gender imbalance something you've noticed, and how much does it bother you?Considered “one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century,” English writer Virginia Woolf was a walker-writer extraordinaire. This is one of my favorite chapters in the book because Andrews does such a thorough job describing how the practice of walking contributed to Woolf’s creative process, as well as the fragile balance of her life. Here are a few snippets from this intriguing chapter. Often when I step outside and set off on a walk, I feel I can slough off the cares of the day, the constraints of my current situation; I become someone else on the move. Andrews shares Woolf’s description of this phenomenon:

There is lots of evidence to suggest that these women took huge pleasure in their physical prowess. It wasn't always about 'beating men', so much as enjoying their own capacity for difficulty. Dorothy Wordsworth for instance writes in 1818 about climbing Scafell Pike with an almost youthful easiness. For others, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, the hardships of walking were about taking control of your own body – choosing what, when and how it suffered. I don't think there was much explicit interest in doing men down, so much as taking pride in what they as individual women could accomplish. Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother, poet William Wordsworth, along with other siblings, were orphaned in 1783 when Dorothy was 12 and William 13, and were subsequently separated. In 1799, well into their twenties, Dorothy and William reunited and walked 70 miles “home,” to the Lake District in England where they were born. They arrived together and happy at their new home, Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Think of famous walkers and it’s men like Wordsworth and Keats who likely spring to mind. But that’s only half the story.’ Country Walking MagazineIn Wanderers, Andrews has taken ten women as her focus, all of whom have lived within the last 300 years, and who have all ‘found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers.’ The blurb declares that Wanderers ‘guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being’. Author Rachel Hewitt wrote in her review of this book: ‘Andrews unearths the forgotten women who have walked for creativity, for independence and self-discovery, to remember, to forget, to escape violence, to aid physical and emotional strength.’ Andrews skirts on the surface of the lives of these women, without really getting into any depth about how they lived or with any context to what was happening in the world around them which would have some bearing on their experience as female walkers. More weight is given to analysing their writing, than to their stories. There is a clear absence of a “history” of women walkers too; just a collection of stories written from a small section of society.