Juliet’s Reviews > In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors: A Past, Present and Personal Story > Status Update

Despite the significant legislative advances that women made in the second half of the nineteenth century, many found their ambitions hamstrung by the myriad constraints that men devised to limit female presence outdoors.
When men couldn't overturn women's formal legislative gains, they turned instead to the arena of culture to restrict women's freedoms.

In this light, I start to wonder if 'loss' is the wrong term for the damage that is done to teenage girls. This is no accident. We do not mislay our freedoms, like losing an earring in a nightclub. Instead, they are taken from us, by boys and men. Perhaps a better word for the traumas that girls face in adolescence is not 'loss', but dispossession or even theft.

whereas acceptable adult masculinity is often defined by self-sufficiency, femininity entails the opposite: being skilled at being social.

Excluding nonverbal forms of intimidation (honking; whistling, inarticulate noises), 65 per cent of women in the USA report having been harassed in public, rising to over 99 per cent when such noises are included.

The American women's rights activist Susan
B. Anthony credited the bicycle with having done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world'

Cycling allowed Lizzie to be self-sufficient and roam for hundreds of miles, carrying her own food and clothing and powered entirely by her own body. It was an emancipation that held particular meaning for women. Hannah Ross describes how the bicycle gave women 'freedom, mobility, autonomy and fearlessness' - even more so as the cost of the vehicles dropped and they became accessible to a wider demographic.

But this method was not foolproof: on one expedition, Lizzie returned to the rock under which she'd placed her skirt to find that it had been swept away by an avalanche. She had to send her guide down to her hotel to collect a new one. (He returned with 'her best evening gown', which she wore for the rest of the descent.

Voluminous skirts had certain advantages. They gave the legs a wide range of motion; the folds of fabric contained enormous pockets that were big enough to accommodate small tents; they could function as blankets when sleeping out overnight; and they probably allowed women to urinate discreetly behind a screen. Emily Hornby found that her petticoat was brilliant as a sledge.

All this has so many knock-on consequences for women's progress and continued participation in sport. As I will explore in a later chapter, women's and girls' perception of our heightened physical vulnerability to abuse and threat from men is the greatest deterrent to our willingness to run, walk, bike, swim, explore and climb outdoors.

women now have better kit, protected competitive categories, more equal prizes, and we are attracting more sponsorship in sporting comps. on the other, we are losing leadership and coaching roles to men, we have less money and time to spend on leisure … - and this gap is widening further - and, while we are participating in sports in greater numbers, our safety outdoors has never been so much under threat.