Twenty-five years ago, Lisa Bloom’s "Gender on Ice" (1993) drew historians’ attention to the ideologies of masculinism and nationalism operating in historical discourses of polar exploration and science. Key to Bloom’s intervention was an analysis of the white, masculine heroism performed and embodied by men such as Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. Since "Gender on Ice," critiques of white, male heroics have become common in histories of the field sciences. Historians have analyzed various ways that ideologies of heroism enabled certain knowers and excluded others. This talk examines dominant notions of heroism in the historiography of alpine and polar science. Specifically, the belief that heroism is primarily exclusionary to female scientists and antithetical to feminist science. I ask two critical questions: Have historians unwittingly adopted a definition of heroism specific to a particular set of historical actors and allowed that to stand for heroism in other historical contexts? What might this mean for the stories we tell (and don’t tell) about polar and alpine field science? I explore these questions and alternative possibilities through telling stories of the mountain explorers and botanists Mary Schäffer Warren (1861-1939) and Mary Vaux Walcott (1860-1940). In doing so, I seek a model for a female hero of alpine science, outlining both her laudable and the objectionable traits, and thereby re-examine dominant historiographical accounts of heroism.
