An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.
This beautiful, meditative work of history puts girls of all race and the landscapes they loved at center stage and reveals the impact of the outdoors on women’s independence, resourcefulness, and vision. For these trailblazing women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods, following the stars, playing sports, and taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only joyful pursuits, but also techniques to resist assimilation, racism, and sexism. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, Wild Girls evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them—and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race and class today. You will read about Harriet Tubman, Louisa May Alcott, the Indigenous Women’s basketball team of 1904, farmworkers’ champion Dolores Huerta, labor and Civil Rights organizer Grace Lee Boggs and more. Now in paperback.
Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University and an expert on the history of slavery and early American race relations.
