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

Tiya Miles

Sep 2023 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Janina Edwards

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University, the author of five prize-winning works on the history of slavery and early American race relations, and a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She is the author of the National Book Award-winning, New York Times bestselling All That She Carried.

Janina Edwards, a graduate of New York University's Tisch Schools of the Arts, recorded her first audiobook in 1987. She is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, as well as a finalist for the Audie Award. In addition to narrating audiobooks, she is a certified yoga teacher, sings kirtan, and plays the violin.