Women on high Pioneers of Mountaineering

In 1808 a spirited French maidservant shocked society by doing what most
people of the day thought impossible for a woman – she scaled Europe’s highest
peak, the legendary Mont Blanc in the French Alps. While the next one hundred
years found society clinging to stifling Victorian perceptions of women as
frail, delicate creatures in need of male protection, a band of courageous
women boldly rejected this limiting mantle. Bucking convention, these daring
pioneers hiked up their skirts, set their sights far above, and took their
place atop some of the world’s highest peaks.

As the author traces the evolution of female mountaineering through the
Victorian era and into the early decades of the 1900s, she illuminates the
very real social and physical boundaries women had to overcome – whether
social norms that dictated a woman’s place as in the home, corsets that
exerted as much as seventy pounds of pressure on their midsections, or long
skirts that caught on rocks and crags as women climbed harrowing slopes. In
the process, Brown’s riveting portraits of these pioneers of mountaineering
reveal how their astonishing ascents of the world’s highest summits are as
extraordinary today as they were more than one hundred years ago. (272 pages,
b&w; photos)