Great Hearts: First Ladies of Aoraki Mount Cook by Hazel Phillips
In Great Hearts, Hazel Phillips celebrates thirty early women mountaineers, trailblazers who climbed Aoraki Mt Cook between 1873 and 1953. They hardly received a mention in mountaineering history because this was written by men who regarded the feats of these women as of little consequence because of their patronising attitude.
Their stories have been sidelined, forgotten, and buried. I hope that Great Hearts properly brings them back into the spotlight! These women weren’t just climbing mountains-they were battling stereotypes, overcoming social norms, and subverting society’s expectations. They should be remembered, honoured, and celebrated,’ she says.
Women were also excluded from the Canterbury Mountaineering Club, formed in 1927. Presumably this was because their members felt, as was common at that time, that a woman’s role was to be a stay-at-home wife and mother whose job was to produce healthy babies for the good of the nation. It was not until 50 years later that they were finally admitted!
Hazel Phillips spent a decade searching through archives to ferret out information about the thirty early women mountaineers featured in her book. Because information was so scarce, and because many of the women left no written record at all, she decided to bend genres. While keeping the book mostly nonfiction, she includes a short fictional vignette in each chapter, in which these women mountaineers tell stories about their climbing adventures and express their thoughts and fears. These are a delight to read.
Great Hearts is richly illustrated with archival photographs that greatly enhance its appeal. Maud and Effie Williams, and Forrestina Ross are shown roped together, ascending an ice face, balancing on tiny steps cut into the frozen cliff with ice axes, dressed in long skirts, puffy white blouses, and bonnets. How they managed to climb in such cumbersome outfits, without coming to grief, defies the imagination, but they were nimble-footed and tenacious, and they did.
As time passed, women mountaineers began to rebel against this highly impractical dress code. They gradually shortened their skirts, then ditched them altogether and swapped them for trousers, like Gillian Jackson, who is pictured, trouser-clad, tackling a vertical ice face.
And by the 1910s and 1920s, women mountaineers were using better equipment too. Crampons and proper ice axes, essential for steeper terrain, replaced alpenstocks (long wooden poles tipped with sharp steel spikes).
The accounts of the feats of these pioneering women mountaineers, and their considerable achievements, which Hazel Phillips has told so well, are thrilling to read.
But Great Hearts is also a captivating and important slice of social history when the role of women was markedly changing. Initially, in the late 19th century in provincial Canterbury, only the privileged daughters of wealthy landowners could afford to take up climbing, or women with connections to male mountaineers. They were always accompanied by men.
From the 1920s on, the Hermitage began to employ female guides who wore trousers and stout boots. They took tourists on mountain adventures and served them alpine picnics. Then, after the day’s guiding, these ‘Girl Guides’ were still on duty and were expected to dress up, don high heels, and entertain guests in the lounge of the Hermitage. But it also gave them opportunities to go climbing. And Betsy Blunden did just that. She bluffed her way into getting the job as she was desperate to quit her boring job at a Christchurch printing firm. Over time, she honed her climbing skills and went on to lead the first all-women unguided climb of a major 3000-metre-plus peak in 1934 with Rosamond Harper and Lella Davidson.
As women entered the professions, they had the means to fund their own mountaineering adventures. Amongst them was Margaret Lorimer, who had signed the suffrage petition when she was 16 years old in 1892 and went on to become the headmistress of Nelson College for Girls. Climbing was her passion and in the summer school holidays she headed for the mountains. Her students nicknamed her ‘The Mighty Atom.’
Hazel intended her stories to show contemporary female climbers that these tough, tenacious women had already carved out a path for them.
For them it would be perfect. But anyone with an interest in women’s history in New Zealand would also find Great Hearts a compelling, important read.
By unearthing their stories, Hazel Phillips has shown that long before the phrase ‘Girls can do anything’ became a national catch cry, these remarkable trailblazing women proved they could by climbing mountains!
Reviewer: Lyn Potter
Massey University Press
