Peak Practices: Englishwomen's “Heroic” Adventures in the Nineteenth-Century American West

Abstract

Many Englishwomen explored the mountainous regions of the American West in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, hiking and taking excursions into popular tourist destinations such as the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley. This paper examines the writings of seven women who toured these regions and published accounts of their journeys. These elite international travelers produced a complex array of gendered subjectivities in their writings. They represented themselves as actively “conquering” mountain peaks as well as passively waiting for the men to do it, as fearing danger and fatigue but also ridiculing the incompetency of local male guides, and as “resisting” adventure, yet expressing female empowerment and abandonment in it. The paper problematizes “feminine” codes of behavior, first-wave feminism, and convergence of these within nineteenth-century British imperialism and narratives of adventure, to show how conventional as well as more transgressive discourses of Victorian womanhood worked with imperialist, nationalist, and class discourses. I examine what the women wrote about both the indoor spaces of mountainous landscapes and their outdoor mountaineering adventures. In many ways, the women reinscribed themselves as feminine domestic subjects in wilderness environments, yet they also explored and contested the powerful inscriptions of conventional Victorian womanhood.