Early Women Mountaineers Achieve Both Summits and Publication in Britain and America

Abstract

’some [philosophers] argue that space is itself a feature of the external world, whereas others regard space as a concept whereby the mind imagines something that is, in fact, quite different from space’ (Callicott and Frodeman 2008: 273). The summit of a mountain is a very precise physical space. To have occupied a space one metre below the summit does not entitle a mountaineer to claim to have reached the summit of the mountain. In the case of some holy mountains where stepping onto the actual summit space would be regarded by local people as sacrilege, such as Kangchenjunga in 1955, this has been accepted by the mountaineering world as a first ascent (Isserman and Weaver 2008: 325). But this is an exception that proves a rule rigorously endorsed. Alone and in a whiteout in 2005 Alan Hinkes thought he had reached a space close enough to the summit of Kangchenjunga to claim that he had made an ascent, but the climbing community expressed some doubt about whether he had (Isherwood 2006: 308).

The critic, after searching in vain for more satisfying matter, has to remind himself that he is dealing with a lady’s book, and the book of a lady who has written to amuse the idle hour.

Alpine Journal review of Elizabeth Le Blond’s The High Alps in Winter (Alpine Journal XI: 306)

When, later, woman occupies her acknowledged position as an individual worker in all fields, as well as those of exploration, no such emphasis of her work will be needed; but that day has not fully arrived, and at present it behoves women, for the benefit of their sex, to put what they do, at least, on record.

Fanny Bullock Workman (with William Workman), Two Summers in the Ice-Wilds of the Eastern Karakoram (1917: 284)