An exceptional woman

In which I argue that adventurous women are not, in fact, unicorns

Hello all,

This week’s piece is the third in an approximate series of articles, asking why we persistently forget about women’s achievements. The other two can be found here and here.

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When I announced that I was going to cycle round the world in 2010, a couple of people told me I’d be the first woman ever to do so, which even then I knew wasn’t the case. The earliest woman to (arguably) cycle round the world was Annie Londonderry in 1895.¹ And I had read books by Anne Mustoe, the retired headmistress who had looped the planet twice by the time I discovered her work.

Exceptionally tired on the Karakoram Highway

Plus there were authors like Dervla Murphy and Josie Dew, who hadn’t claimed to circumnavigate anything, but had covered a heck of a lot of miles on two wheels. I didn’t feel I measured up to them in any way, but at the same time, seeing what they had done at least gave me something to aim for.²

At this point the BBC documentary about Mark Beaumont’s 2008 record attempt was still a recent memory, so people were familiar with the concept of ‘cycling round the world’ – but it didn’t seem to have occurred to them that this was for anyone other than your stereotypical tough guys. So when I told friends about my plans, their immediate conclusion was that I would be a pioneer – the first woman ever to attempt such a thing.

And of course I’m not. Far from it. There have always been female adventurers, and there are more now than you could possibly imagine. Just because no one’s told you about them, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Why, I ask yet again, do we have this tendency to paint any adventurous woman as an exception? It’s not just that it’s inaccurate. It also implies to other women that although this one very special woman could do such a thing, they themselves probably couldn’t.

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A year into my journey, I found myself dog-sitting in Hong Kong, waiting for my next Chinese visa to be issued. A kind friend put me in touch with Rob Lilwall, author of Cycling Home From Siberia, who lived locally, and whose book I’d recently enjoyed on my Kindle, as I camped out in a roadside mosque in Iran. I met Rob and his wife for lunch, and they told me how pleased they were to have found out about my adventure.

“I sometimes have ladies coming up to me after my talks,” he said, “and they ask me ‘could a woman do the sort of things you do?’ And I’ve never known what to say to them. Now I can tell them that I’ve met a woman who travels by bike, so they could too.”

I can’t remember how I responded in the moment, but my enduring reaction was amazement, bordering on horror.