Wild Girls
How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Publishers Weekly and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions and Literary Hub
“Thoroughly absorbing.… A beautiful synthesis of diverse women’s experiences, combining history with memoir and a call to action.” —Jill Watts, New York Times Book Review
An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.
Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women’s basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World’s Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sacagawea and Pocahontas, and to underappreciated figures like Native American activist writer Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertrude Bonnin, farmworkers’ champion Dolores Huerta, and labor and Civil Rights organizer Grace Lee Boggs.
This beautiful, meditative work of history puts girls of all races—and the landscapes they loved—at center stage and reveals the impact of the outdoors on women’s independence, resourcefulness, and vision. For these trailblazing women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods, following the stars, playing sports, and taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only joyful pursuits, but also techniques to resist assimilation, racism, and sexism. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, Wild Girls evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them—and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race and class today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With insight and imagination, Harvard historian Miles (All That She Carried) explores the ways in which the natural environment presented "new possibilities" for 19th-century women and girls expected to acquiesce to the confines of a "restrictive domestic sphere." During the 1820s and 1830s, Harriet Tubman labored in the forests and swamps surrounding the Maryland estates where she grew up. She had rejected indoor work at an early age, having realized it provided her enslavers more of an opportunity to surveil her. Outdoors, she taught herself survival skills that she later used to free herself and others. In the 1830s and 1840s, future Little Women author Louisa May Alcott thrived on nature walks in the New England countryside. According to Miles, Alcott's nature writing became her "subtle tool of social commentary," a way of critiquing and subverting prescribed gender roles. Dakota writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin attended an American Indian boarding school in Indiana in the 1880s and later described the Indigenous girls' "wild freedom" when playing basketball outdoors; their participation provided a double-edged opportunity to accommodate and resist the school's curriculum, which was designed to erase Native cultures. Miles concludes her evocative and unique study with a chapter expressing concern that growing barriers for marginalized groups to outdoor spaces will hinder social progress. It's an inventive take on what inspired people to challenge norms and agitate for change. Illus.
