Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation (A Norton Short)

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Publishers Weekly and New York Public Library Best Book of 2023 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 womens basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 Worlds 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 Zitkla-, 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 racesand the landscapes they lovedat center stage and reveals the impact of the outdoors on womens 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 themand argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race and class today. 11 illustrations