Hazel Phillips’ new book Great Hearts gives voice to early women alpine explorers.
(Listen to the full interview with Hazel in The Wild podcast.)
What is Great Hearts about?
It is fundamentally a social history of women mountaineers, from 1873 when a woman first walked on the glaciers of Mount Cook to 1953, the first all-women, unguided ascent of Aoraki Mount Cook. It tells the individual stories of 30 women climbers, while at the same time telling the wider narrative of how women’s mountaineering developed, and the barriers they had to overcome.
What drew you to researching and writing a history of women mountaineers? Why did these stories need to be told?
I’ve spent the past decade researching women climbers but also grappling with archival absence, and thinking critically about how stories that lie outside of the dominant narrative tend to get dismissed. I was astonished to find that these early women climbers were treated as footnotes. Mountaineering literature has often, historically, been a tool of empire and ego, written by a specific class of men. Instead of just recounting history, this book is about actively questioning the frameworks that produced it.
You’ve used a technique called ‘critical fabulation’ to fill in archival gaps. Tell us about this technique and why you used it.
It’s a literary method designed to confront the gaps, silences and erasures in the archives. I’ve written these women’s stories mostly as nonfiction, but each story includes a fiction scene from that woman’s point of view. Women seldom talked or wrote about their own adventures in the way that men did, so a lot of what we know about them is framed up by other people, so taking an approach of creative scholarship can help us fill in the blanks and bring history to life in new ways.
Of all the mountaineers in this book, do you have any favourites?
Betsy Blunden blagged her way into a guiding job at The Hermitage in the 1920s. In her interview she was asked if she’d climbed mountains before, and she said yes – failing to mention they were the sort of mountains you could reach on horseback! She soon moved from being a picnic guide to guiding on bigger climbs, simply by waiting until all the male guides were booked up, then suggesting high climbs to the guests at The Hermitage – knowing she would be the only person available for the job.
What kind of obstacles did these women need to overcome in order to climb at all?
Society’s expectations, for a start. Young women were encouraged towards more delicate pursuits with the aim of getting married and producing healthy babies for the good of the nation. Independence certainly wasn’t encouraged, and outdoor activity beyond croquet and gentle walks was just not the thing.
Women were often also directly shut out – for example, the Canterbury Mountaineering Club was formed in 1927 but didn’t allow women members until 1977, and that’s a lot of training, knowledge and gear that Christchurch women didn’t get access to.
As a mountaineer, do you find it incredible they achieved what they did with the clothing and gear they had?
Absolutely; the really early women (late 1800s) climbed in their Sunday best – think long dresses, wide-brimmed hats draped with a motoring veil, and fancy gloves – almost a ‘church in the morning and glaciers by noon’ sort of thing. They carried alpenstocks and climbed via steps cut into ice faces. That evolved into hobnailed boots and long ice axes, then crampons became more widespread. By 1953, the first all-women unguided climb of Aoraki Mount Cook, women were wearing trousers and flannel shirts, roped together on glaciers and climbing with more modern tools. Real boots and grit sort of stuff.
Great Hearts is available in the Wilderness bookstore. Subscribers get a 10% discount.
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