Fanny Bullock Workman
Fanny Bullock Workman was an American geographer, cartographer, explorer, travel writer, and mountaineer, notably in the Himalayas. She was one of the first female professional mountaineers; she not only explored but also wrote about her adventures. She set several women's altitude records, published eight travel books with her husband, and championed women's rights and women's suffrage.
Born to a wealthy family, Workman was educated in the finest schools available to women and traveled in Europe. Her marriage to cemented these advantages, and, after being introduced to climbing in New Hampshire, Fanny Workman traveled the world with him. They were able to capitalize on their wealth and connections to voyage around Europe, North Africa, and Asia. The couple had two children, but Fanny Workman was not a motherly type; they left their children in schools and with nurses, and Workman saw herself as a New Woman who could equal any man. The Workmans began their travels with bicycle tours of Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Algeria and India. They cycled thousands of miles, sleeping wherever they could find shelter. They wrote books about each trip and Fanny frequently commented on the state of the lives of women that she saw. Their early bicycle tour narratives were better received than their mountaineering books.
At the end of their cycling trip through India, the couple escaped to the Western Himalaya and the Karakoram for the summer months, where they were introduced to high-altitude climbing. They returned to this then-unexplored region eight times over the next 14 years. Despite not having modern climbing equipment, the Workmans explored several glaciers and reached the summit of several mountains, eventually reaching on Pinnacle Peak, a women's altitude record at the time. They organized multiyear expeditions but struggled to remain on good terms with the local labor force. Coming from a position of American privilege and wealth, they failed to understand the position of the native workers and had difficulty finding and negotiating for reliable porters.
After their trips to the Himalaya, the Workmans gave lectures about their travels. They were invited to learned societies; Fanny Workman became the first American woman to lecture at the Sorbonne and the second to speak at the Royal Geographical Society. She received many medals of honor from European climbing and geographical societies and was recognized as one of the foremost climbers of her day. She demonstrated that a woman could climb in high altitudes just as well as a man and helped break down the gender barrier in mountaineering.
Early life
Workman was born January 8, 1859, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to a wealthy and elite family descended from the Pilgrims; she was the youngest of three children. Her mother was Elvira Hazard, and her father was Alexander H. Bullock, businessman and Republican Massachusetts governor. When Elvira's father died, Alexander became one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts, which allowed them to have their daughter educated by governesses before attending Miss Graham's Finishing School in New York City, after which she spent time in Paris, and then Dresden, where she acquired fluency in German and French, thus getting familiar with foreign languages that would be essential in her future. Thomas Pauly writes in his short biography of Workman that "early on Fanny chafed at the constraints of her privilege". A small number of her stories from this time survive, describing her interest in adventure. In one, "A Vacation Episode", she describes a beautiful and aristocratic English girl who is contemptuous of society. She runs away to Grindelwald, becoming an excellent alpinist and marrying an American. The story encapsulates much of Fanny's own life: wanderlust, a love of the mountains, and a commitment to women's rights. In 1886, she published a short story, set during the First Indian War, in New York Magazine about "the capture and rescue of a white girl"; a reviewer of the story stated that it was "told in a very pleasant and infatuating style".In 1879, Fanny returned to the United States and on June 16, 1882, married William Hunter Workman, a man 12 years her senior. He was also from a wealthy and educated family, having attended Yale and having received his medical training at Harvard. In 1884 they had a daughter, Rachel, however she was not able to calm both her parents growing restlessness.
William introduced Fanny to climbing after their marriage, and together they spent many summers in the White Mountains in New Hampshire; here she summited Mount Washington several times. Climbing in the Northeastern United States allowed Fanny to develop her abilities together with other women. Unlike European clubs, American climbing clubs in the White Mountains allowed women members and encouraged women to climb. They promoted a new vision of the American woman, one who was both domestic and athletic, and Workman took to this image with enthusiasm. By 1886, women sometimes outnumbered men on hiking expeditions in New England. In her paper on the gender dynamics of climbing in the region, Jenny Ernie-Steighner states that this formative experience shaped Workman's commitment to women's rights, pointing out that "no other well-known international mountaineers of the time, male or female, spoke as openly and fervently about women's rights". However, both of the Workmans disliked the provincial nature of life in Worcester, where they resided, and yearned to live in Europe. After both Fanny's and William's fathers died, leaving them enormous estates, the couple embarked on their first major European trip, a tour of Scandinavia and Germany.
Move to Europe and cycling tours
In 1889 the Workman family relocated to Germany citing William's health, although Pauly speculates that this may have been merely a pretext, for he recovered surprisingly quickly. The couple's second child, Siegfried, was born shortly after they arrived in Dresden. Fanny chose not to conform to the traditionally circumscribed roles of wife and mother, and became an author and adventurer. Less than a year had gone by since Siegfried's birth when the two children were entrusted to nurses, allowing both parents to embark on a series of journeys on a safety bicycle, a recently popular invention.She lived a vigorous life that diverged from idealized femininity in the 1800s. As a feminist, Fanny considered herself an example of the idea that women could equal and excel over men in the arduous life, and embodied the New Woman ethos of the day. Through cycling, Fanny sought more than simple exercise, liberation form the painful memories of her son and an escape to the exotic. She completely disregarded societal expectations of the traditional wife committed to family life. Instead, she aimed at a different identity, one that freed her from conventional female responsibilities and that also allowed her to pursue her own ambitions.
Moreover, as Miller points out in her book about women explorers, since the ideal family of the time was a large one and information about birth control was not easily available, William's medical knowledge must have been invaluable. The Workmans left their children with nurses while they took long trips.
What started as simple trips to near cities soon transformed into complex cycling expeditions through countries like Italy, France, or Switzerland. In 1893, Siegfried died from a combination of influenza and pneumonia. After his death, according to Pauly, Workman, through her bicycle tours, "aggressively pursued an alternative identity, one that liberated her from the conventional responsibilities of wife and mother and allowed for her interests and ambitions". They missed their daughter's wedding to Sir Alexander MacRobert in 1911 while exploring in the Karakoram.
Together, the Workmans explored the world and co-wrote eight travel books that describe the people, art, and architecture of the areas they journeyed through, however she always did most of the writing. The Workmans were aware of their contribution to the genre of travel writing, as they commented on other writers in their own works. Their mountaineering narratives said little about the culture of those remote and sparsely inhabited regions; they included both lyrical descriptions of the sunset, for example, for their popular audience and detailed explanations of geographical features, such as glaciers, for their scientific readership. Fanny and William added scientific elements to their writings to appeal to authoritative organizations such as the Royal Geographical Society; Fanny also believed the science would make her more legitimate in the eyes of the climbing community, but it cost her readers. In general, their bicycling tour narratives were better received than those about their mountaineering exploits. Fanny wrote the majority of these travel books herself, and in them she commented extensively on the plight of women wherever she traveled.
Stephanie Tingley writes, in her encyclopedia entry on Workman's travel writing, that there is an implied feminist criticism of the hardships women experienced and the inferior status of the women in the societies she encountered. As a strong-willed, outspoken supporter of women's rights, Workman used their travels to demonstrate her own abilities and to highlight the inequities other women lived under. However, their travel books are written in the first-person plural or third-person singular, so it is difficult to decisively attribute views or voices to either William or Fanny. The Workmans' works are colonialist in that they describe the people they meet and observe as "exotic or unusual, at worst as primitive or even subhuman". However, at times they make it clear that the people they encounter see them in a similar light, demonstrating that they were sometimes aware of their own biases.
Between 1888 and 1893, the Workmans took bicycling tours of Switzerland, France, and Italy. In 1891, Fanny became one of the first women to climb Mont Blanc. She also was one of the first women to climb the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn; her guide was Peter Taugwalder, who had made the first ascent with Edward Whymper. In 1893, the couple decided to explore areas beyond Europe and headed for Algeria, Indochina, and India. These longer trips were Fanny's idea. The couple's first extended tour was a bicycle trip across Spain in 1895; each of them carried of luggage and they averaged a day, sometimes riding up to. Afterwards, they co-wrote Sketches Awheel in Modern Iberia about their trip. In it, they described Spain as "rustic, quaint, and charming",also referring to the country as Iberia. In Algerian Memories Fanny focused on the beauty and romance of the countryside, but also highlighted the abuse and neglect of women in Algerian society.
Fanny opted not to write a book about her journey to Egypt, likely because she recognised that she could not rely on her bicycle to spark curiosity in the country's saturated touris attractions.