Wild Girls How The Outdoors Shaped The Women Who Challenged A Nation Tiya Miles by Tiya Miles 9781324020875, 1324020873 instant download after payment.

A National Book Award–winning, NY Times best-selling historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women's basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World's Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls also brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sakakawea & Pocahontas, & to underappreciated figures like Native American activist writer Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertrude Bonin, farmworkers’ champion Dolores Huerta, & labor & Civil Rights organizer Grace Lee Boggs.

For the girls at the center of this book, woods, prairies, rivers, ball courts, & streets provided not just escape from degrees of servitude, but also space to envision new spheres of action....

This beautiful, meditative work of history puts girls of all races—and the landscapes they loved—at center stage & reveals the impact of the outdoors on women’s independence, resourcefulness, & vision. For these trailblazing women of the nineteenth & early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods, following the stars, playing sports, & taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only joyful pursuits, but also techniques to resist assimilation, racism, & sexism. 

Lyrically written & full of archival discoveries, Wild Girls evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them—& argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race & class today.

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Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University, the author of 5 prize-winning works on the history of slavery & early American race relations .