Living on Earth Today

Living on Earth is an independent media program and relies entirely on contributions from listeners and institutions supporting public service. Please donate now to preserve an independent environmental voice.

For information on how to listen to audio on our website, click here.

Women of Discovery

Dr. David Livingstone, Laurence of Arabia, and Lewis and Clark are just a few of the heavyweights in the history of exploration. Their adventures in the wild were the stuff of legend, and countless publications recount their travels. But to find their female counterparts, you’d have to dig deep for even the slimmest of volumes. So that’s just what author Milbry Polk did. She picked through the backrooms of library archives and traveled to distant corners of the globe in order to piece together the stories of history’s greatest women explorers.

Along the way, she learned of women who braved the jungles of the Amazon, who traveled with cannibals in the Congo, and who overturned the mores of their society in order to explore. Polk chronicles the stories of 84 women in her book, Women of Discovery: A Celebration of Intrepid Women who Explored the World. And though many of their names and stories may be unfamiliar, she writes that "the story of women explorers is as old as time, as old as myth, and as real as memory."

	Featured Women Discoverers
	Mary Kingsley Annie Smith Peck Lady Mary Pierrepont Wortely Montagu Zora Neale Hurston Lorna Marshall If you would like to read the transcript from our on-air broadcast click here.

	Living on Earth Today Audio Feature
	Women of Discovery

Buy Women of Discovery by Milbry Polk and Mary Tiegreen