Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Man’s World

The globe-trotting tales of five women who fought for the right to enjoy the wild places of the earth.

For millennia the ’wild’ was a place heroic men went on epic quests. Women were prevented from joining them, either through physical control or powerful myths about what would happen if they ventured beyond the city wall or village boundary. So how did women claim their place in the remote and lovely parts of our planet?

In Wildly different, historian Sarah Lonsdale traces the lives of five women who fought for the right to work in, enjoy and help to save the earth’s wild places. We’ll meet Mina Hubbard, who outraged the exploration community when she stepped into a canoe in northern Labrador. Evelyn Cheesman, who became the first female keeper of insects at London Zoo. Dorothy Pilley, who shocked polite society by donning men’s climbing breeches. Ethel Haythornthwaite, who helped make the Peak District Britain’s first National Park. And Wangari Maathai, who started a movement to plant millions of trees across sub-Saharan Africa.

Drawing on interviews with Sir David Attenborough, Wangari Maathai’s daughter and others, Lonsdale recounts the women’s adventures across five continents. Evocative and inspiring, this book shows how women can be ’wildly different’.

Sarah Lonsdale is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at City, University of London. She is the author of the books Rebel Women between the Wars (2020) and The Journalist in British Fiction and Film (2016) and writes for the Times Literary Supplement, History Today and the Sunday Times.