Women's Arctic Fieldwork, 1900-1950: Five psychobiographical case studies
Narratives of Arctic exploration, scientific advancement and conquest often constitute the only framework for the public to conceptualise the Arctic. In these, the Arctic is depicted as a terra nullius for the exercise of male heroism. Although historians have engaged with the subject of women entering male professional fields since the 1970s, women remain crucially absent from the history of Arctic field science. Today, although women’s presence in Arctic field stations as scientists is normalised, a prejudice endures in the determination of who is a good field scientist. There have been attempts to feminize the north but most focus exclusively on the representation of the north in writing through the lens of discourse analysis. This research focuses on five women who undertook fieldwork in the Arctic in the first half of the twentieth century. Their activities spanned nearly the entirety of the Arctic, from Lapland to Greenland and Alaska. These women are Isobel Hutchison, a Scottish botanist, poet and writer; Ethel Lindgren, an Swedish-American anthropologist who studied reindeer-herding peoples; Joan Newhouse, a British woman who wrote an auto-ethnography of a year spent among the Sami in Norway; Phyllis Wager who, after marrying the geologist Lawrence Wager, became the first British woman to overwinter in Greenland; and Marie Stafford Peary, the daughter of Robert Peary, who led the 1932 Peary Memorial expedition to Greenland. To this day, the Arctic is conceived as an arena for the development of self-understanding. The purpose of this writing is to better understand the affective value of women’s experiences in the Arctic by approaching their Arctic fieldwork from a psychobiographical angle. My research offers a different answer to the question of how to “feminise” the Arctic”: that it is feminised, as it was masculinised by men, by the actualisation of women’s desires onto its landscape and people. This thesis contributes to a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of the history Arctic field science, of the Arctic in ‘geography’ and the workings of the geographical community.
Arctic, biography, fieldwork, gender, history of science
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