Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Mans World
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Mans World
By (Author) Sarah Lonsdale
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
11th June 2025
4th March 2025
United Kingdom
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Gender studies: women and girls
Nature and the natural world: general interest
Physical Properties
Hardback
296
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Description
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'.
Reviews
Wildly different is an urgent, timely and original study of five pioneering women who fought for the right to explore and protect the wild. Sarah Lonsdale writes from the heart, and nothing has brought home to me with more force the relationship between gender and the natural world.
Frances Wilson, author of The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
Author Bio
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.
