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1 / 15 photos Daring Female Adventurers
Sacajawea, a young Shoshone Indian, was captured by the Hidatsa Indians and later sold to French-Canadian fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, who made her one of his wives. In 1805, she and her husband were hired as interpreters for explorers Lewis and Clark, as they traveled across the Rocky Mountains in Oregon Country. As they encountered the Shoshone, Sacajawea would translate what they said into Hidatsa, which her husband then translated into French. A member of the expedition who spoke French would then translate the final round in English to Lewis and Clark.
Sacagawea
British socialite Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope served as the personal secretary to her uncle, British Prime Minister William Pitt, until his death in 1806. Using the money he willed to her, Stanhope traveled the world—especially the Middle East, where she eventually led the first archaeological excavation in Palestine.
In 1839, Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of English explorer Sir John Franklin, became the first European woman to travel overland between Port Phillip and Sydney, Australia. During her time in the colonies of Australia, she worked to found secondary schools and gave aid to female convicts.
At the age of 44, college professor and lecturer Annie Smith Peck decided to take up mountain climbing, becoming the third woman in history to scale the Swiss Matterhorn—and the first to do so wearing pants, instead of a skirt. In 1908, at the age of 58, she became the first person to ascend Mount Huascaran in Peru. She made her final ascent, of New Hampshire's Mount Madison, at the age of 82.
Annie Smith Peck
Female journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, known by the pen name "Nellie Bly," was never one to shy away from a good headline. In one of her best-known features for the New York World in 1888, Bly attempted to travel around the world in 80 days. She made it, almost entirely unchaperoned, in only 72.
Nellie Bly
After losing both of her parents in 1892, Mary Kingsley decided to use her inheritance to travel to Sierre Leone and collect research for her father's unfinished book on the cultures of Africa. She wrote two books about her observances there: Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899).
Isabelle Eberhardt began dressing as a man at an early age, in order to gain the same freedoms afforded men of the 1800s. After the death of her parents in the late 1890s, Eberhardt fully converted to Islam and traveled under the identity of a man in order to explore the deserts of Algeria and write about her adventures. She died in 1904, after rescuing her husband from a flash flood.
In 1904, Harriet Chalmers Adams headed to South America with her husband on a three-year trip. This would become the first of many adventures for Adams, who traveled more than a hundred thousand miles over her lifetime. She wrote about her travels for the National Geographic Society but, because the National Geographic Society didn't allow women at the time, she launched her own group—the Society of Woman Geographers—and served as its president.
After becoming the first woman to graduate with a history degree from Oxford, Gertrude Bell headed to Tehran. She spent the next decade traveling around the Middle East, helping to establish the modern foundations for Iraq, developing reliable maps of Middle Eastern terrain, becoming fluent in over five languages, and writing about her travels.
After exploring the Arctic while touring on a Norwegian cruise ship, Louise Boyd fell in love with polar exploration, and chartered annual trips to the Arctic, where she conducted scientific studies and took many photographs. In 1955, at the age of 68, she became the first woman to fly over the North Pole.
Gertrude Ederle, known as "The Queen of the Waves," learned how to swim as a child at her family's summer cottage. She went on to become a gold medalist at the 1924 Summer Olympics. However, she was best known as the first woman to swim across the English Channel, which she did just to prove that a woman could do it.
Gertrude Ederle
Before her mysterious disappearance during an attempted flight around the world in 1937, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to receive the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross; to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean; to fly non-stop across the U.S.; and to fly an autogyro, among other recordbreaking achievements.
Amelia Earhart
Travel writer Freya Stark wrote more than two dozen books about her adventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where she explored areas of Iran that no other Westerner had seen.
In 1983, at the age of 32, physicist Sally Ride became the youngest American, and first American female, to go into space. She spent more than 343 hours serving NASA missions in space.
Sally Ride
Not content with being the second woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1986, musher Susan Butcher went on to win three more consecutive Iditarod races. She was the first person to win four times in a row.
Susan Butcher
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