TRAVELS WITH FANNY BULLOCK WORKMAN

CATHRYN PRINCE joins the trailblazing mountaineer and women’s rights advocate

CATHRYN PRINCE joins the formidable mountaineer and women’s rights activist

FANNY BULLOCK WORKMAN

was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid morals of her time, finding them as restrictive as a corset. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers. She became the first American woman to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris and the second woman to address the Royal Geographical Society of London. Her books, co-authored with her husband, were replete with photographs, illustrations and descriptions of meteorological conditions and glaciology.

Born on 8 January 1859 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Workman came of age in a most patrician household. In 1876, her parents sent her abroad to study. She returned home in 1879. Two years later she wed William Hunter Workman, a physician 12 years her senior. The two often climbed New Hampshire’s White Mountains and then, shortly after the birth of their first child, they decamped for Europe to begin a lifetime of exploring.

I imagine joining Workman in 1906, when she climbed Pinnacle Peak, the third highest peak in the Nun Kun massif. She first set eyes on the area in 1898 when she and Hunter had fled the incessant heat of the Indian plain for the cool reaches of the Himalayas. By now she had conquered the Alps and cycled tens of thousands of kilometres through India,