From Electric Lit:
The history of women hiking in nature is almost non-existent. Instead, Cheryl Strayed is widely believed to be the first woman to boldly walk day after day in remote, unpeopled landscapes. This is a terrible misconception.
Five years ago, exasperated by the male dominance of walking and nature writing, I began researching women walkers of the past for my latest book Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women. It seemed to me that while women had made great progress in public, urban life, the myth of Male Wilderness was harder to shift. The wilds endured as a place for well-heeled white men to prove their masculinity.
But women have always walked. And not merely to carry water and firewood. Like men, women hiked for pleasure, solitude, creativity, and catharsis. During the 19th-century, numerous women hiked solo over mountains and across plains, beside rivers and through forests. Many of them published accounts of their walks—gripping memoirs that have languished in archives or been entirely forgotten.
. . . .
Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews
The first nonfiction book to excavate lost women walker-writers of the past and return them to the literary stage. Andrews spent over a decade researching women from as far back as the 18th-century in a scholarly bid to prove that women have always hiked in wild landscapes. From Elizabeth Carter to Dorothy Wordsworth to Cheryl Strayed, Andrews argues for a re-evaluation of the genre now known as literature of the leg.
A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time by Antonia Malchik
A Walking Life is a series of meanders through the many facets of walking. Malchik is one of the empathetic few to write about walking while attending to those who cannot walk. She makes a compelling case for better public transport, for greater access to wild landscapes, and for more power to the pedestrian, while lambasting the highways that have gobbled up vast tracts of American wilderness. For Malchik walking is a political act—and as someone who grew up car-less, I lapped up her impassioned prose.
. . . .
The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
The Living Mountain is quite possibly the most remarkable account of hill-walking ever written. The Scottish poet and novelist, Nan Shepherd, recounts a life spent walking in the Scottish highlands. Her prose is now considered some of the best “nature-writing” ever penned, as Shepherd shows us how to walk into the heart of a mountain using all of our senses. This slim volume was out of print for decades but is now lauded as a masterpiece.
Link to the rest at Electric Lit