 Greetings from the National Archives of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Jane Zanglein, author of The Girl Explorers. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, March 11th at noon, Bruce Levine will be here to tell us about his new biography of Thaddeus Stevens. One of the foremost abolitionists in Congress before the Civil War, and firm proponent of equal rights for black Americans during Reconstruction. And on Monday, March 15th at 7 p.m., Julia Swagg will discuss her new biography, Lady Burr Johnson, Hiding in Plain Sight, which documents the former First Lady's complex role as a political partner to her husband and as a vital yet underappreciated presence in the White House. In 1932, Maureen Peary Stafford, daughter of Polar Express Flora Robert Peary, set off for Greenland on a mission to build a monument there honoring her famous father. Film footage and lantern slides in the National Archives document this Peary expedition, and a collection of Maureen Peary's papers are in our donated materials. Before Peary Stafford set off, Harriet Chalmers Adams, the first president of the Society of Women Geographers, presented her with the Society's flag. This voyage marked the first time the flag was carried on an expedition. Today, we'll hear more about the Society of Women Geographers and its intrepid members. The flag first carried to Greenland in 1932 later went to the depths of the ocean and into space, each time marking a contribution to the world's store of knowledge. Women scientists and explorers before the Society's founding and after have used their intellectual curiosity to enlarge our understanding of the world. I'm looking forward to this opportunity to learn more about them from Jane Zagline. Joining the conversation today is Carolyn Torkelson, president of the Society of Women Geographers. Her passions are sharing the history of women explorers in the natural world, especially astronomy, and she's worked at science museums and various federal agencies. Our guest author, Jane Zagline, is passionate about publicizing the accomplishments of women ignored by history and chronicling the challenges women face today. She's an avid researcher and has won more than 20 awards for her scholarship. For the girl explorers, she conducted extensive archival research and visited a dozen countries. Now let's hear from Jane Zagline. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the National Archives webinar on the Girl Explorers. I'm Caroline, also known as Sifie Torkelson. I'm the president in 2021 of the Society of Women Geographers, which is a great honor. And a little bit just about me is I'm a geographer, cartographer, I have a GIS background. I'm a dark sky proponent interested in astronomy. And I've worked for several government agencies, mostly natural resources, including the EPA and the Forest Service and the Peace Corps, and at two science museums. So I'm interested in museums as well. And I found out about any pack while I was working on my thesis in Master's, when I was working on my Master's degree. And she was one of the members of the Society of Women Geographers. And so after I wrote my thesis, I started writing a book about her and I'm following the footsteps of her, kind of a travel log plus following her footsteps. So that's kind of my connection. And now let me introduce Jane Zanglein. She is an author who is passionate about publicizing the accomplishments of women that have been ignored in history and chronicling the challenges that women face today. So her book is called, it's a brand new book, it's called The Girl Explorers. And it features women explorers from the 1920s and the early days of the Society of Women Geographers and then documents the history up until today. And she has a fabulous website about her book too and about all these women explorers and what's going on today. And Jane has a background in law. She's an emeritus professor at the Western Carolina University. And she is also, she did a dispute and resolution and negotiation in China in 2019. And she traveled to 58 countries. So let me now begin our question and answers. Jane, how did you find out about the Society of Women Geographers? Okay. So I didn't know about them before I started writing the book. I discovered them while I was researching the author Blair Niles. She was one of the founders of the Society and I was very intrigued with her. I wanted to write a book about women explorers. And I found out that in 1910, she traveled around the world with her husband, William Beebe. He worked for the Bronx Zoo and they traveled 50,000 miles in two years looking for every species of pheasants in Asia. So I researched her by going to a lot of archives. I went to the Virginia Historical Society, Princeton University's Rare Book Manuscript Division, the Howard Gottlieb Library at Boston University, the Harry Ransom Center, which is where this picture is from. It's a picture of Blair and a prisoner on Devil's Island. I love the shadow in the background that looks like he's going to kill her or something. But it was from the Harry Ransom Center, which is at the University of Texas, and also the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is at the Bronx Zoo. So I discovered that the pheasant expedition took a toll on her marriage. And when they returned to the United States, she and her husband, she actually kind of arranged to have their new home be next to this guy that she really liked. And then she had an affair with him. And then she traveled to Reno to get a divorce. And once she had that divorce, she was free to travel and do the things that she wanted to do, which was not pheasants and wasn't Asia, it was Latin America. And so I was reading about her, and then I discovered that in 1925, she met with a friend who was Marguerite Harrison. Marguerite Harrison, they had lunch together. Marguerite had recently returned from this filming of this movie called Grass, and this is a photograph from that movie. She and her filmmaker and the director traveled for seven weeks through Persia, which is now Iran. They accompanied 50,000 Bakhtiari nomads as they guided their livestock, which were a half million cows, horses, goat, sheep across the hot Persian desert and across six mountain ranges to their winter pastures. Well, when they met, they talked about a lot of things, like the fact that the media always asked women explorers things like, do you wear makeup? What kind of clothes do you wear? Do you have any love interests? And so Blair was really excited to be talking to another explorer about these type of questions and the difficulties they face when they were traveling. And so they both kind of simultaneously agreed that there was need for the Society of Women geographers. Blair said, men have organizations where explorers can meet and receive help and inspiration from each other. Women need such a society. So they started the society and within seven years, they had 200 members all around the world. And when I was researching those members, I went to the Library of Congress because that's where the society's records are kept. So I researched the society in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and you've got a better grasp on them today. So when I was researching them, one of the primary objectives was to give women a place to network. That was really important to them with other women when they returned from an expedition. So how does the Society of Women Geographers meet that objective today and especially during a pandemic? So there's many things that we do. So just getting right into the pandemic now, we have Zoom sessions for members which are all around the world. And so people can just, there's ones where you just kind of chat and enjoy things and other ones where they're more focused and have topics so people can get to know each other. And also webinars, when people come back from flag expeditions or whatever or they're maybe doing some research and they want to present it, they'll do webinars and the webinars are available to the public as well off our website, they're always recorded. We have a Facebook site that's open to the public. We have a newsletter that has all the activities that everybody's been working on and updates. And of course, well, now it's old-fashioned, but email. People also email back and forth. And there are local groups, there's chapters. So there's like a New York chapter, a DC chapter, one in Florida, one in Chicago. And so even during this time, they can do a little bit of social distancing and go for walks and things like that. And then every three years, we have what's called a triennial, which moves around the country. And so everybody can attend those. But of course, right now, we can't do that because of the pandemic. And also, there used to be a yearly meeting also in Paris for the people that are in Europe. So hopefully those will come back. And then this fall, we're going to have an award ceremony for some people that in our organization that are going to receive awards. And then we have also people doing fellowships right now. And so we're still giving money out for fellowships. And so these women are also being connected with all of the members. And then hopefully, a lot of them have become members or will become members after they do their research. That's great. I went to a couple of the webinars. I went to the one today on COVID. I did too. Yes, it was very good. It's like, I want to travel when we travel. I know. Exactly. OK, so I have a question for you. And I probably know the answer. But what early member is your favorite and why? Yeah. I've got to say Blair. Blair Niles. Blair is my favorite. Yeah. She is, I became fascinated with her. And the reason that I became fascinated with her is that she was a southern belle. She was born and raised on a plantation. And yet she became an advocate for black people. And I thought that was remarkable in the 1920s and 30s. And really, I became kind of obsessed. Like, why did she do this? She wrote books. This picture is from her book Black Haiti. Black Haiti, the subtitle is something like America's Eldest Daughter. And it talks about the Haitian Revolution, which was the biggest black revolution in the world. And how that happened and how people were faring in Haiti under the American occupation. That was in the mid-1920s. And really, a very remarkable subject, I thought. And also, several other members of the Society of Women geographer, Zonia Barber, who was a geologist. She also worked in Haiti doing a report for the World Peace Organization, maybe, on how people were faring in Haiti. The next book she wrote was Columbia, Land of Miracles. And Blair actually came up with this new style of travel writing. And she viewed travel writing as a biography. And she wrote a lot of biographies and fictional biographies. But she wanted to explain drama without. She wanted to explain the history about a country in a dramatic fashion, not like drama that we think of today, but in a way that was very engaging. And so what she'd do, she'd come up with these questions she had. And the question for this book was about this patron saint of slaves, that's San Pedro Claver. It's a patron saint of slaves. And he baptized 300,000 slaves in 1600. Well, the question she had is, why would you baptize them? Why wouldn't you just fight to get them to be free? And so that was the premise of her book, like why would he do that? And so it's a pretty engaging book. And then the next book that she wrote that I thought was remarkable, considering that she grew up on a plantation with freed slaves, was East by Day, which was about the Amistad mutiny. And she chronicled the mutiny as it was occurring. And then she had her main character have this love interest with one of the attorneys who was working on the case. And so then she talked about the Supreme Court's decision that slaves were not property. So my question in doing my research, I guess it kind of paralleled what Blair was doing. I was trying to figure out what motivated her to do this. And I found out that her grandfather was Roger Atkinson Pryor. And he was a representative in the House of Representatives. And he represented Virginia. And he was the person in Congress who came up with the phrase that we know today, which is irreconcilable conflict. That it's an irreconcilable conflict that Congress has with respect to the issue of slavery will never resolve it. And so when Lincoln was elected president, they actually had he threatened to kill Lincoln. And they had the newspapers wrote poems about him killing Lincoln with a sword because he had such a bad reputation as being a person with a temper and actually threatening people with duels. So they kind of made fun of him. But after the election, he traveled down to South Carolina. And in South Carolina, he gave this speech that was a pivotal speech according to the New York Times. It was a speech that asked, you know, why did that ask, would South Carolina please secede from the nation? Because Virginia is very old and she's very slow. But if you secede, we will secede as well. That word of that got back to the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and then he declared war. And then Roger Atkinson prior was actually, given the opportunity, it was called the honor, to become the person who fired the first gun of the Civil War. And he said no. He said no. Later on, when Blair was in college, he actually regretted all his decisions and he became a judge in New York. But I think as a result of that, Blair's Nile's mother was extremely liberal. She was extremely liberal. She actually had a school she had in her house for the former slaves and the neighborhood kids because there was no school for them back then. So I was interested in why Blair became an advocate for the marginalized and oppressed. And I think that was the reason her family history, she had to atone for it in some way. And she also believed it was so wrong that she didn't do that. I also tended to like the really brazen outspoken women. Anna Taylor was one of them. I went down to the South Carolina library and read her diaries. She's a real trip. But she was a leader in the Charleston Renaissance art movement. And she actually worked with Blair's ex-husband in British Guiana as a scientific artist. Another favorite is Ellen Lamott, who was a gay nurse. And she tended wounded soldiers in France. And she wrote unflinchingly about the horrors of war. So unflinchingly that her book, The Backwash of War, got censored and without for a few months. And then it was censored because they didn't want to hear any bad things about the war. Later on it came back to be republished. So she met Gertrude Stein. And Gertrude kind of had a crush on her. And they talked about her book. She gave a copy of her book to Gertrude, who then gave it to Ernest Hemingway and told him that he should write like Ellen. And so just really spare powerful writing. And the last person, there are so many more, but I'll stop here is Annie Peck, who was a mountaineer that you have followed. So I'll kind of turn it over to you. Because Annie Peck, she was a real outspoken woman. Yes, she was. So what were your experience? And how has your perception of Annie changed now that you're following in the footsteps of her? Well, going through South America, I just thought about how tenacious she was. So she was and how she kept changing her life. She started out as an archaeologist. And she went to school in Greece. So I went to visit the school in Greece where she went to school, which is still there. And she was the first woman in the school. But the school had really been just created a few years before she arrived there in the 1890s. And she got her degree there, because she really wanted to do what her brother did. She wanted to go and teach Greek at a level at the university. But this was not really very possible for her at the time. So then she started lecturing. And then she moved on to doing mountaineering. She just saw the Matterhorn and fell in love with it and decided she wanted to climb the Matterhorn. So I went to see the Matterhorn. And I went to the library there to interview the fellow that runs the museum there and learned a little bit about the history of her there. And so that was really amazing to see the Matterhorn. I'm not a climber, but I went up partway. I'm a haker, so I could at least see what she was experiencing. And then I went to where the hut was that she stayed at that had just been torn down. And they had just redone it. But just thinking about how strong she had to be in this era when women were supposedly supposed to be at home. And she was doing this all as a single woman, too. And her family didn't approve of all this, but she did it anyway. And she was determined to go her own way. And then she switched over. She decided she wanted to do something really exciting and go climb a big mountain. So she climbed in Mexico. And then she climbed in South America, hoping to find the highest peak that there was there. And at the time, she first attempted Mount Surrata, then realized maybe Mount Wasgaran would be taller. So that became her obsession. And it took her six times to climb it, mostly because she had companions that didn't appreciate having a female leader. And she had no money. So it was always a challenge for her. But she did it. And in 1908, she climbed Mount Wasgaran. And she's then quite, she's older. She's in her 50s. And so before that, though, when she was going on her way to Mount Surrata, she climbed Mount El Misti. And so I thought, well, I can climb that. I can do that. So I did. I went and I climbed El Misti. So I was just thinking about how in her era, how they took donkeys partway up. And people aren't really using donkeys so much today. And she would have gone by sea to Araquipa, where I flew. And later in life, she also flew in small airplanes to the same route. Oh, yeah, 20,000 miles around South America. Exactly. She was the first tourist. She wanted to show how easy it is to travel around South America. Because now, while she was mountaineering, she discovered she just loved Latin America. And so she tried to promote relations between the two continents, North America and South America, and promote geographic education and try to connect us better. And so this was one of, and she wrote a guidebook on South America, and also more of an industrial, commercial kind of book, too, for businessmen. So then I went up to the area where Mount Wascoan is to see the mountain. And I tricked up a bit. I didn't climb it, but I could look up and I could kind of see through the clouds all these huge glaciers. And so just thinking about how she did this. I mean, on this trip, I was with my husband. So I'm traveling with a man. I'm traveling in this era where it's more acceptable, of course, for women to travel. I can wear pants and be comfortable. She was traveling in long dresses as a single woman, trying to find her way in a country that was not, I mean, today it's not as exploration. Back then, it was really a true adventure for her. And so she would come by sea. And now she came over the Black Mountains. So I took a bus up the top of the ridge of the Black Mountains and trekked down, where she would have trekked over from the sea using donkeys, which she did, and walking along. So I'd see those differences. And then just thinking, but thinking the landscape is probably very similar. And maybe even some of the indigenous people, it's a very similar scene to when she was there. And then I also went to see her grave in Providence. And I went to see the last apartment complex that she lived in in New York City, too. But I also talk about in my story, it's a travelogue to some of the places I went that she did not, but might have liked to go to. Like I climbed Kilimanjaro. I thought that might have been an exciting thing for her. She wanted to climb Mount Everest. I mean, she had grand goals. I mean, no women back then were even thinking this, but she was. So I went to Nepal and did some trekking. So I was thinking about her there, how she would have really enjoyed that, too. So I kind of interweaved the story with her. But yeah, she was amazing because she never married. She did this all on her own, always struggling financially. And then she died at about age 85. But right before she died, she wanted to go back and see the grease because it was so important to her. So she went back, but she didn't continue around the world. She wanted to see the whole world because she was feeling ill and then moved. I went back to the East Coast and soon after that died. But Blair Niles was one of her friends and was there almost on her deathbed when she was sick. And she writes about that in her Peruvian pageant book that Blair Niles wrote, which has a couple of really interesting pieces in there about Annie Peck, who was a good friend to hers. Yeah, I remember the 83rd birthday party with 83 candles. I'm the cake. And Blair, of course, was a master of publicity. So she had the newspaper cameraman there to snap a picture. And Annie was one of the, she was the oldest member of SWG because this was kind of the end of her era and the new women were creating all this exploration group. They didn't have that in her era. So she was the oldest member. So yeah. They called her Ms. Peck out of courtesy, out of respect. Well, what early members of the society would you like to know more about besides Annie? Well, there's so many. I mean, just from your book, I learned about a whole many more that I did not know about. But I would say Dorothy Bennett would be one. She's from Minnesota, as I am. And she got a degree in English and then she studied astronomy and anthropology. And one of my interests is also astronomy. And she wrote the Golden Guide books to all the different topics. And the astronomy one, when I was a child, that's what got my interest in astronomy. And she was a curator at the Hayden Planetarium. And then she was also a curator at the Berkeley Museum of Anthropology. And so I'm very fascinated by her. And another one is Catherine Barrett, who she traveled in the Himalaya with her husband, Robert Barrett, who was a geographer. And in Patagonia, but first before that, she wrote books for children. And then the two of them, I mean, she had a beautiful writer, which I guess that's one reason I liked her, but her and her husband went to Tenerife and they stayed in a canvas tent for a few months while they wrote this book about traveling in the Himalayas. She's fascinating. And then another lady I learned about from your book is Elise Boestemann, who has beautiful paintings under the sea. And I would really like to learn more about her too. I would too, I would too. I just read that her great-great-grandson found a bunch of her diaries. Oh, wow. I love the fact that she wrote, she did these spectacular pictures, especially of bioluminescence and fish. Yeah, she was amazing. I, she's at the top of my list. Okay, so what surprises did you uncover in your research? Yeah, I found a lot of trivia. I could do a whole little book on trivia about society of women geographers. I learned that Helen Candy, who studied tapestries, she was on the Titanic when it sank and she lived to tell that story. In fact, the story she wrote about it became the love story in the movie Titanic. You know, when they're hanging off the bow of the boat, that she actually did that and wrote about it and that's where they got it from. So Helen Candy. I loved all the women who worked with William Beebe. This is a picture of Gloria Hollister, who was a marine biologist and Jocelyn Crane, who studied crabs. And then in the center is William Beebe, who's Blair's ex-husband. I found out that a lot of women from the society would go down and visit them at the research stations. I guess they were kind of fun places to go vacation and hang out with other members of the Society of Women Geographers. Delia Ackley. I loved her because she kind of has a sad story. She and her husband, Carl Ackley, who's a famous big game hunter who did all the elephants in the Museum of Natural History. She found this monkey on one of their expeditions and she fell in love with this monkey. I mean, so much that her husband would write her notes of, dear, could you please love me more than the monkey? And she brought him home to their Manhattan penthouse of apartments and the monkey was a terror. And Carl couldn't deal with it anymore. So finally he divorced her. I thought it was interesting that so many of the women geographers got divorced at the time when it was scandalous. So Delia though then was one of the, she was a very good game hunter. And so after her divorce, it surprisingly and to their credit, the Brooklyn Museum asked her to go on expeditions and get more specimens for them. So she managed to do very well despite the fact that she was divorced and no longer attached to her husband's identity. Gloria Hollister, who could not love a woman who walks on the bottom of the ocean with that big copper helmet on their head. And she was the first woman to go down in the bath sphere around submersible that got lifted into the ocean by a winch. And I have to say to their credit, the National Archives supported the preservation of her papers at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which might be one of the reasons that we have this photograph. Marguerite Harrison, she became a newspaper reporter because she wanted to go to Europe during the World War I. And then she found out that the Baltimore Sun wouldn't send her, so she approached the government and they sent her there as a spy. And she was captured and spent about a year in the Lubionka prison. A lot of the women, members of the Society of Women Geographers had good relationships with the president. That might be in part because Theodore Roosevelt was an explorer, but a lot of them visited the White House. It also helped that Eleanor Roosevelt became a member. And she became friends with Teata, who was a Chickasaw interpretive dancer and storyteller. And she invited Teata to the White House to perform for British dignitaries to show them what American culture was about. And then Francis Perkins and Francis Oldham Kelsey. I think this is kind of strange. They almost look like sisters, don't they? A little bit. When Roosevelt became president, Blair pressured Eleanor to convince FDR to hire the first female cabinet member. And he hired Francis Perkins for the Department of Labor. And then Francis Oldham Kelsey was also a member who worked for the FDA and she is the person who refused to approve that drug, thalidomide. So those are some of the trivia that I found out while I was doing the research. Yeah. So do you think the Society of Women Geographers is still relevant today since the Explorers Club now accepts women? Yes, absolutely. There's a place for women. There needs to be a place where women can network with other women explorers and scientists and artists outside the presence of men. I think that the Society gives women a place to support each other and that's very important. Our picture is kind of covering that newspaper article, but it says, don't take a woman with you when you go exploring, which was what the president of the Explorers Club, Roy Chapman Andrews, whose picture there, said when he was the president and in 1932. In 1981, Carl Sagan wrote a letter to all the members of the Society because women were still not allowed to join. So he said, when our organization was formed in 1905, men were preventing women from voting and pursuing many occupations for which they are clearly suited. In the popular mind, exploration was not what women did. Even so, women have played a significant but unheralded role in the history of exploration. And then he went on to say that's covered that today women are making extraordinary contributions in areas that are of fundamental importance to our organization. And he pointed out, and I'm gonna mention these from left to right, Mary Leakey, archeologist. The middle is Jane Goodall. And then at the right is Catherine Sullivan. And he mentioned that all those women were important and should be members of the Society. And then, so he convinced the directors to actually hold the vote on it. And the directors and the president had no expectation whatsoever that the members would vote to include women, but they did and shocking to the president and so they invited a bunch of women including Catherine Sullivan, astronaut, to join. And I thought what was remarkable was that first she joined the Society of Women Geography. And today it's kind of sad but the Los Angeles Adventurers Club still does not admit women. And I think that the importance of the Society of the Women Geographers is that as long as there's discrimination against women, explorers, scientists, artists, people who travel and study countries, and that's so rife in areas, remote areas like the Arctic and Antarctica, where men can do horrendous things to women and really stifle them, their careers, there's always gonna be a need for the Society of Women Geographers until those male bastions are crushed, so yes. I agree. And let's see, we're gonna speed it up a little for our time. Yeah, okay, so you wanna ask the question? Oh, yeah, yeah. So what's the status of the Society of Women Geographers today and who are their prominent members? Well, today the organization is going strong. There's about 400 members of all sorts of amazing women. I would have to say all of them are just wonderful and they all are so accomplished and in many fields from science to the environment to art, but I would mention a few here that are very prominent. Of course, I don't know if this picture is Sylvia Earle, but it could be, she's one of the ones I was gonna mention. And of course, she's known for her underwater exploration and her mission blue to help preserve the oceans. And she was the first female chief of NOAA as part of her career too. And you mentioned Catherine Sullivan. She was the first woman to walk in space and also the first woman to go to Challenger Deep, which was just last year. So she's had two amazing firsts and Jane Goodall. And of course, we all know who she is, but she's still going strong in conservation and trying to help the world. And Arlene Blum, she is a Mountaineer. She was one of a couple of the first female expeditions to Annapurna One and to Denali. And so these are, I would say, like some of the more prominent ones, but of course, we're doing plague expeditions. There's one starting out in pretty soon and there's one out there right now, but I don't need to, I won't go into all that if we don't have time here, but yeah, okay. Okay, so we're gonna skip my questions about the fun part, but it was all fun anyway. And wrap it up. So I'd like to thank you, Carolyn Sippy, for joining me on this webinar. And thank you so much, Jane. Yeah, this was wonderful. And thank everybody for attending and hopefully everyone enjoys this and thanks to the National Archives too. Yes, thank you very much.