Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation

Written by Tiya Miles

Narrated by Janina Edwards

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land 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 brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sacagawea and Pocahontas, and to underappreciated figures like Native American activist writer Zitkála-Šá, farmworkers' champion Dolores Huerta, and labor and Civil Rights organizer Grace Lee Boggs.

This work of history puts girls of all races-and the landscapes they loved-at center stage and reveals the impact of the outdoors on women's independence, resourcefulness, and vision. For these trailblazing women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods, following the stars, playing sports, and taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only joyful pursuits, but also techniques to resist assimilation, racism, and sexism. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, Wild Girls evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them-and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race and class today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781696613040

Tiya Miles

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Cundill History Prize, and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She has been awarded more than twenty historical and literary prizes for her books and articles on slavery and race. She is also the author of Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series.

Reviews for Wild Girls

[Randi Dawson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Loved the history and information. The structure wasn’t pleasing. It skipped around a lot. Happy to read it but it felt rushed and not edited well. Great research! Solid read. You’ll learn a lot.