Wild Girls

April 1, 2023

Author of the National Book Award--winning, New York Times best-selling The Things She Carried, Miles profiles young women in U.S. history shaped by their emersion in the natural world, with results significant to us all. For instance, Harriet Tubman learned about terrain when she was forced to labor outdoors, which eventually facilitated escape from enslavement for herself and others, while Louisa May Alcott's passion for running through fields and forests helped her circumvent gender expectations in rigid New England. Prepub Alert.

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July 1, 2023
How women discovered themselves in nature. Harvard historian Miles, a MacArthur fellow and National Book Award winner for All That She Carried, offers a sensitive examination of the lives of women--primarily Black and Native American--for whom the natural world served as an "imagination station and training ground." For women such as escaped slave Harriet Tubman, Indigenous explorer Sacagawea, and science fiction writer Octavia Butler, the natural world provided "a space to discover who they were and what they were capable of." Tubman, who labored largely in fields, farms, and forests, learned how "to listen to, forage, and navigate the woods," skills that enabled her to successfully liberate dozens of slaves. Similarly, Harriet Jacobs, who was formerly enslaved, saw "trees and woods as places of relief, restoration, secrecy, and refuge." For Tubman, Jacobs, and white abolitionist Laura Smith Haviland, "nature's classroom" made them acutely aware of societal and political subjugation and oppression. Miles connects love of nature with a celebration of "wild freedom" in the works of Louisa May Alcott, a self-proclaimed tomboy who loved to romp in the woods, escaping the strictures of Victorian girlhood; and in the writings of Native American poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, for whom the "uncomfortable realities of colonial intimacies" underlay her lyrical depictions of beloved landscapes. When Native American children were forcibly sent to government boarding schools, wrenched from their natural surroundings, many rebelled against the cultural and physical confinement they endured. Among 20th-century women whose lives were indelibly shaped by their outdoor experiences, Miles includes Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs and Mexican American labor activist Dolores Huerta. The author's own reverence for nature intensified during the pandemic, when her backyard became a place of solace and beauty. Acknowledging the privilege that affords her this space for herself and her family, she makes a compelling plea for fostering "outside equity" to allow everyone to partake of nature's gifts. A fresh, graceful contribution to women's history.

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Starred review from July 17, 2023
With insight and imagination, Harvard historian Miles (All That She Carried) explores the ways in which the natural environment presented “new possibilities” for 19th-century women and girls expected to acquiesce to the confines of a “restrictive domestic sphere.” During the 1820s and 1830s, Harriet Tubman labored in the forests and swamps surrounding the Maryland estates where she grew up. She had rejected indoor work at an early age, having realized it provided her enslavers more of an opportunity to surveil her. Outdoors, she taught herself survival skills that she later used to free herself and others. In the 1830s and 1840s, future Little Women author Louisa May Alcott thrived on nature walks in the New England countryside. According to Miles, Alcott’s nature writing became her “subtle tool of social commentary,” a way of critiquing and subverting prescribed gender roles. Dakota writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin attended an American Indian boarding school in Indiana in the 1880s and later described the Indigenous girls’ “wild freedom” when playing basketball outdoors; their participation provided a double-edged opportunity to accommodate and resist the school’s curriculum, which was designed to erase Native cultures. Miles concludes her evocative and unique study with a chapter expressing concern that growing barriers for marginalized groups to outdoor spaces will hinder social progress. It’s an inventive take on what inspired people to challenge norms and agitate for change. Illus.

August 31, 2023
In this unique and compelling entry in the Norton Shorts series (described as "brilliance with brevity"), historian and author Miles (All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, 2021) reconsiders women in American history and their interactions with the natural world. With Harriet Tubman, Louisa May Alcott, and Sacagawea anchoring the narrative, Miles turns to a host of their lesser-known contemporaries to consider kinships between women and the wild. Drawing heavily on published works about her subjects, as well as their own books, letters, and diaries, she reveals how relationships with the outdoors impacted women's lives in the past while reflecting on how cultural assumptions about femininity and race affected the development of those relationships. The personal stories range from intriguing to downright inspiring--the Native American players of the Fort Shaw basketball team deserve a movie!--but it is the author's insatiable curiosity and obvious affection for her subjects that will most captivate readers. So many fascinating women of different races are included in this little book. It's a true treasure!

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