THE GIRL EXPLORERS

A lawyer’s account of trailblazing women who made history through their travels and their founding of the Society of Women Geographers.

In her “first non-law book,” Zanglein, who has traveled to 58 countries, reveals how a group of early-20th-century female explorers went about proving wrong the men who doubted their skills, grit, and professionalism. The author focuses on writer and world traveler Blair Niles (1880-1959), whose novels about Devil’s Island convicts and gay men in Harlem helped her gain a reputation as "an advocate for marginalized and oppressed people.” Niles and several of her traveler friends founded the Society of Women Geographers in 1925 after being excluded from the all-male Explorers Club. The wife of a prominent zoologist named Will Beebe, Niles caused a scandal in 1913 by divorcing him (he never acknowledged her assistance in his research) and marrying a younger man who shared her passion for travel. She took an active role in the women's suffrage movement, which put her into contact with such future Society members as Mary Ritter Beard, who had traveled the world "to recover women's history.” In an ironic twist, Beebe offered opportunities for research and travel to many of the women—such as science artist Anna Heward Taylor and zoologist and deep-sea diver Gloria Hollister—who eventually joined the Society. Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photos and narrated in a style that moves back and forth between expository and quasi-novelistic, the book offers fascinating glimpses into lives that are as inspiring as they are unconventional. While the story lacks diversity—all of Zanglein’s subjects were White, and many came from privileged backgrounds—the author’s message, that "only when male bastions crumble will society be whole and history complete," is both topical and important.

Informative reading on a subject with which many readers will be unfamiliar.