“I have learned that if a woman has the courage to do something in a male world, it will be hard work,” Chorol writes. She also co-founded Ladakhi Women’s Welfare Network after a woman was gang raped in a nearby area. In 2009, Chorol founded the Ladakhi Women’s Travel Company, the first female owned and operated trekking company in the Himalayas.īut carving out a place for women in the trekking industry is just one of Chorol’s many projects. Female travelers felt safer trekking with female guides and Ladakhi women-who had been systematically pushed out of the tourism economy-were looking for employment. Her reflections were in part sparked by her encounters with Australia’s aboriginal communities, where, Davidson notes, women had more power before colonization changed the cultural fabric of these societies.Ĭhorol, who was the first in her village to attend school, noticed a gap in this tourism market. “I hope that I will always see the obsession with social graces and female modesty for the perverted crippling insanity it really is,” she writes. In her memoir, Tracks, Davidson speaks of the liberation she found alone in the desert, where she was free of “prettiness and attractiveness.” She describes walking naked under the blazing Australian sun, as menstrual blood drips down her leg.

Starting in Alice Springs, Davidson journeyed through parts of the Australian outback unknown to most, ultimately walking her way to the Indian Ocean.

In 1977, 26 year-old Robyn Davidson embarked on a 1700-mile journey through the Western Australian desert, with three camels and a dog named Diggity. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Robyn Davidson In Honouring High Places, a memoir that celebrates Tabei’s life, her friend Setsuko Kitamura writes that Tabei “continued opening the door to nature for all.” Tabei, who died in 2016, encouraged other women to become mountaineers, and founded the first women’s climbing club in Japan in 1969 during a time when most climbing clubs banned women. “Most Japanese men of my generation would expect the woman to stay at home and clean the house,” she once said in an interview.

Wild by Nature by Sarah Marquis