Mountaineering Women Climbing Through History

As adventure sports like climbing and mountaineering become popular, women’s visibility in the sport has also grown. Mountaineering Women is a richly illustrated collection of the awesome and often surprising stories celebrating the achievements of twenty women climbers from across the globe.

From the Amazigh (Berbers) of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco to the Inca Empire, high in the Andes, women have long traversed the world’s most forbidding peaks. When, many centuries later, mountaineering took off as a sporting activity in the West, it was plucky Victorian women who defied convention to tackle the fabled summits of the European Alps. Yet despite the fact that women have a pronounced and rich history in the sport, they are conspicuously underrepresented in mountaineering literature.

Mountaineering Women seeks to readdress a narrative that frequently focuses on the exploits of white, male “explorers.” The climbers come from a wide range of nationalities, and each of their compelling stories is accompanied by a specially commissioned ink illustration and evocative black-and-white photographs. Three sixteen-­page full-­color photographic sections, meanwhile, reveal the mountaineers in action in mountainscapes in all their grandeur.

Bookending the main chapters is a comprehensive introduction, written by Nandini Purandare, editor of the internationally renowned Himalayan Journal, and a closing essay by professional climber Ashima Shiraishi, looking toward the future of the sport.