Status Updates From In Her Nature: How Women Br...

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.

This pattern [male ultra runners seaming readier to adopt risky race strategies] seems to be confirmed in runner Mitch LeBlanc's analysis of the Leadville Trail 100 Race in zoI1, in which the most likely group to finish were women aged 40 to 49 (59 per cent finishing rate), while the least likely were men aged 20 to 29 (32 per cent finished).3

Others used the outdoors to try out more unconventional ideas about manhood: to rediscover natural' authentic emotions that were being stifled in a mechanised society, or to take on domestic jobs usually assigned to women, such as cooking and cleaning in their camps.
The importance of the outdoors as a crucible in which different ideas about masculinity could be forged drove many men to explicitly exclude women.

Male discomfort with women's presence characterised the outdoor leisure movement from the beginning. This was partly because many men used the outdoors to experiment with their identities as men.
Some were drawn to outdoor adventure to counteract what could be seen as the sedentary, 'effeminate nature of city life in which middle-and upper-class men rarely worked with their hands, …

Mountaineering offered a way for women to resist such segregation and the first woman to summit Mont Blanc experienced how it could directly confer finan cial authority. In 1809, a 'neat-looking peasant woman' called Maria Paradis reportedly came up with the idea of the ascent to drum up publicity for the tea stall she ran at the foot of the mountain.

Frances Havergal loved the delicious freedom and sense of leisure' that came from 'having no one to consult, or to keep wait-ing, or to fidget about us' as she and her female friend 'stormed' mountains with 'our alpenstocks and scrambled and leaped and laughed and raced as if we were not girls again but downright boys!"

In Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet derives great personal pleasure - but also attracts social censure - for being "in the habit of running and looking
'almost wild' as she rambles 'three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone!"

« The history of outdoor pursuits, from its beginnings to the present, is marked by a belief that immersion in the natural world offers respite from our day-to-day routines, and sometimes inspires us to make permanent and dramatic changes in our lives. »