#female explorers

[clioportraits]

Port Colborne, our hometown, is full of secrets and mystery and buried civilizations..     Tuesday August 5, 2008, 7:31 am     Yet some of

I just read the biography of Anna Mitchell-Hedges and it may be the most impressive story I ever read about the most incredible and polyfacetic woman ever to exist!

[teded]

Today is Sally Ride’s Birthday! 

Sally Ride was the first woman in space, and we’re celebrating her by watching this TED-Ed Lesson on female explorers throughout history: The contributions of female explorers - Courtney Stephens

Art by Lizzi Akana

[thecalendarwomen]

One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around me, and found them either worthless or wanting.

Explorer, trader, and anthropologist Mary Henrietta Kingsley

[theemiratestimesblog]

Crafting Out-of-the-box Traveling Experiences With SCN Travel & More – Stephanie Neuer

Crafting Out-of-the-box Traveling Experiences With SCN Travel & More – Stephanie Neuer

Stephanie Neuer is the owner of SCN Travel & More. She is an entrepreneur with exceptional experience in the tourism, events, and hospitality industry. She has over 20 years of experience in the field. She has worked across Europe and the Middle East, which makes her more knowledgeable about the market there. Her company, SCN Travel & More, aims to curate unique and excellent travelling…

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The contributions of female explorers - Courtney Stephens

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7 Fearless Female Explorers History Should Never Forget

7 Fearless Female Explorers History Should Never Forget

A female sailor who cross-dressed to discover the world from a different angle, an African-American aviator who looked past racial and gender discrimination to become a pilot, a fearless investigative journalist who circumnavigated the globe in 72 days, and a housewife who didn’t let age and gender stop her from traveling – these are the different faces of women who toured the globe more than a…

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[tyciblog]

From deserts to mountains, to infinity and beyond, Anna Samson charts the fascinating world of female explorers...

Picture an explorer. Let a cartoon quickly sketch itself into your mind. The khaki shirt tucked into khaki shorts with a thick brown leather belt, rolled down socks and a water bottle. The Panama hat. Is it a man? It’s probably a man. Now, I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by patronising them and saying, “You know, there are female explorers too”. We all know that - but aside from Lara Croft, with her digitally swollen breasts disproportionate to her concave waist and penchant for getting flattened by boulders, how many do we actually know?

Over pints, I ask my friends to name famous explorers, and they throw up a grand list; ancient and modern, terrestrial and otherworldly, real and fictional. Columbus, Neil Armstrong, Robert Falcon Scott, Commander Hadfield, Edmund Hillary and Indiana Jones – we know their achievements like we know nursery rhymes, never consciously learned but never forgotten either. But when I add one simple stipulation – that the explorer they name is female – then we start to run into quicksand. Just a lonely Sally Ride is murmured. Sounds like a good place to start.

In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, 14 years after three men walked on the moon. Before her first flight, she was often asked in interviews about her reproductive organs and whether she got upset when things went wrong, questions laced with the assumption that she was somehow less capable than her male counterparts. She always answered with the affirmation that she only saw herself in one way – as an astronaut – and her work on the committees investigating the Challenger and Colombia disasters gave the world a better understanding of the limitations of space travel.

Ride was also probably the first LGBT astronaut, something which was only publicly acknowledged after her death in 2012. Along with her partner Tam O'Shaunessey, she wrote children’s science books, which encouraged them to “reach for the stars”, a message that has taken on a wider significance following the reference to O’Shaunessey as her partner in her obituary. Your gender, or what kind of person you like to wake up next to, has nothing to do with how efficient you are at calculating the physics necessary to send rockets into space – of course.

On this side of the Atlantic, we have just celebrated 25 years since Dr Helen Sharman blasted into an eight-day orbit at the age of 27 - which makes me, pushing my 24th birthday, feel gloriously inferior. She, not Tim Peake, was the first Brit in space – so why is this error commonly made? It could be to do with her disinterest in creating a public persona, or the fact that the mission was run by and mainly funded by the Soviets in the years leading up to the fall of the USSR, meaning it fell by the wayside in our collective consciousness. And yes, it’s entirely possible that it’s partly to do with her being a woman, and so regarded as less of a “hero”. But regardless of the reasons for her faded acknowledgement, her mission was groundbreaking in its own right.

Of course, it’s nothing new that women have had a curiosity about the world around them – why wouldn’t they, when it’s the most natural of human instincts? Few people can claim a lust for exploration that equals that of Gertrude Bell, who not only mapped great swathes of Syria and Jordan and established new trekking routes up mountains (on one expedition she spent 48 hours clinging to a rope after the weather turned bad) but also used her political expertise and seven languages to help establish modern day Iraq in the 1920s… Remember what I said about feeling inferior? Her legacy is still felt in the country today, with reports of local Iraqis comparing women serving there to Bell.

Once you start looking, there are so many female pioneers, whose achievements become all the more incredible when you consider the limited freedoms of women during these times. Jeanne Baré, who joined explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s crew in 1766, is considered to be the first woman to have sailed around the world, collecting and discovering new species of plant, but was only able to do this disguised as a man. The Lady Hester Stanhope was disgraced at home because of the affairs she had during the 1800s, so she packed her bags and became the original Tomb Raider, excavating ruins in Egypt and The Ottoman Empire, all the while dressing in men’s clothing. Then there’s Annie Edson Taylor, who became extremely poor after deaths of her father and her husband, and the only option for a woman in her position looked to be the workhouse. Instead, she devised a plan to become the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls – in a barrel, at the age of 63.

And women are still forcing us to revise maps and textbooks with their thirst for adventure. There’s not enough room to write about them all, so look them up - Sophia Danenberg, the first black woman to climb Everest; Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, who scaled the 14 highest summits in the world without using bottled oxygen; Cindy Lee Van Dover, who dives into the depths of the ocean discovering new species previously unknown to us humans. 2013’s class of astronauts in training was half female, and could well be a hothouse for the first person to stand on Mars. With a better knowledge of those that came before us, we can look forward to a new generation of women who don’t just follow in footsteps, but instead take inspiration before forging a new path all of their own.

So take your mental eraser, and rub out that image of an explorer that you had in your head – because he doesn’t really exist - and in his place, draw someone else. Give her Gore Tex and a map, or a space suit and a great orb helmet, or battered desert boots and a Swiss Army Knife. Give her tenacity, bravery and an inquisitive mind. Because unlike her cartoonish counterpart, she is real – and we owe it to her to celebrate that.

[Anna Samson]

Read more in our EXPLORATION series HERE.

[julianworker]

10 of the most inspiring contemporary female adventurers A look at the female explorers making their mark today and inspiring others to get out and blaze a trail