Women of The World: Women Travelers and Explorers

Extraordinary Explorers

by Rebecca Stefoff

Women of the World looks at eight women whose heroic journeys added to the world's geographic Ida Pfeiffer, an 19th century women with "an insatiable desire to travel" who circled the world--twice, Fanny Bullock Workman, the world's foremost woman moutaineer, an early feminist, and
one of the most controversial figures in modern geography, and Alexandra David-Neel, the first western woman to enter Lhasa, the Forbidden City of Tibet.

Genres: History, Biography

Hardcover

First published February 18, 1993

Reviews

[Julia Simpson-Urrutia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading about Ida Pfeiffer (born in Austria in 1797), Fanny Bullock Workman (American), California socialite Louise Arner Boyd and the other six female characters in this book. I liked the fact that they broke stereotypes of what was expected of women in their day. Pfeiffer, for instance, decided to visit the Holy Land around the age of 45. She loved the Middle East and went back. Strangely, her favorite people, worldwide, ended up being the headhunters of Borneo, the Diyak people. Unexpected also applies to Isabella Bird Bishop, born in England in 1831. In the UK, she was kind of sickly and frail, but whenever she went on a trip aborad, she became robust. It started with her doctor in Britain prescribing a sea voyage after a tumor was removed from her spine when she was 18. She was filled with energy as she steamed across the Atlantic, but as soon as she got home, she promptly became ill, weak and depressed. At the age of 40, she set off for Australia and New Zealand, going on to Hawaii, the USA and the Rocky Mountains. In this area she fell in love with a scout and hunter named Mountain Jim Nugent, who guided her around Colorado. But she left even him to keep going--visiting Japan, South China, and Malaya, where she dined with two apes. She said they had very good manners except that sometimes they grabbed food without waiting for it to be passed. This same lady got married to a Dr. Bishop when she was 50. He died five years later and she consoled herself with a trip to the Indian subcontinent, passing later through Persia and Kurdistan. She was the first woman ever to address the Royal Geographical Society, in 1892. This did not happen often. No woman who picks up this book will be disappointed. The adventuresses are all dynamic, from these described to the American spy Marguerite Baker Harrison, the first woman to be thrown into the Lubianka Prison by the Soviets.

[Hila]

Solid introduction to a group of fascinating women.