Victorian Adventures with Fanny Bullock Workman
by Barbara J. Euser
      

Excerpts:

     There is no shelter from the sun on Siachen Glacier in the Indian Himalaya. Sweat ran down Fanny Bullock Workman's neck as she looked down past her calf-length skirt, past the puttees wound around her legs, past her hobnailed boots, into the crevasse yawning before her. Her Italian friend and guide Cesare Chenoz had just disappeared into the depths . . .

. . . In 1912, no Westerner had ever trekked the Siachen Glacier. It was a blank spot on the maps prepared by the British Great Trigonometric Survey, which was attempting to map all of India. Fanny Bullock Workman and her husband William had already made six expeditions into various ranges of the Indian Himalaya . . .

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. . . Fanny and William's first major trip was a 3,000-mile bicycling excursion across Spain. In 1895, bicycles had heavy steel frames and solid rubber tires. Yet the couple managed to ride between 40 and 70 miles a day throughout the summer. Fanny was conservative in dress and never adopted pantaloons, the fashion of the day for sportswoman. Instead, she pedaled wearing a long skirt. She rode with a teakettle dangling from her handlebars . . .

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 . . . Unlike all of the Workman’s jointly-authored books, Fanny wrote Two Summers in the Ice Wilds of the Eastern Karakorum, covering their 1911 and 1912 expeditions, by herself. In an author’s note, Fanny explains: “The object of placing my full name in connection with the expedition on the map is not because I wish in any way to thrust myself forward, but solely that in the accomplishments of women, now and in the future, it should be known to them and stated in print that a woman was the initiator and special leader of this expedition. When, later, woman occupies her acknowledged position as an individual worker in all fields, as well as those of exploration, no such emphasis of her work will be needed; but that day has not fully arrived, and at present it behooves women, for the benefit of their sex, to put what they do, at least, on record.”  . . .

 


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