Women have been exploring the regions around Antarctica for many centuries. The most celebrated "first" for women in Antarctica was in 1935 when Caroline Mikkelsen became the first woman to set foot on one of Antarctica's islands."Women in Antarctica: Sharing this Life-Changing Experience" , transcript of speech by Robin Burns, given at the 4th Annual Phillip Law Lecture; Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; 18 June 2005. Retrieved 5 August 2010. Early male explorers, such as Richard Byrd, named areas of Antarctica after wives and female heads of state. As Antarctica moved from a place of exploration and conquest to a scientific frontier, women worked to be included in the sciences. The first countries to have female scientists working in Antarctica were the Soviet Union, South Africa and Argentina.
Besides exploring and working as scientists, women have also played supportive roles as wives, fund-raisers, publicists, historians, curators and administrators of organizations and services that support Antarctic operations. Many early women on Antarctica were the wives of explorers. Some women worked with Antarctica from afar, crafting policies for a place they had never seen. Women who wished to have larger roles in Antarctica and on the continent itself had to "overcome gendered assumptions about the ice and surmount bureaucratic inertia". As women began to break into fields in Antarctica, they found that it could be difficult to compete against men who already had the "expeditioner experience" needed for permanent science positions. Women who were qualified for expeditions or jobs in Antarctica were less likely to be selected than men, even after a 1995 study by Jane Mocellin showed that women cope better than men with the Antarctic environment.
Historic barriers against inclusion
Most early policies and practices, including the construction and creation of Antarctic organizations, were created initially by men. Women were originally excluded from early exploration in Antarctica based on the opinion that women could not handle the extremes in temperature or crisis situations. Vivian Fuchs, who was in charge of the British Antarctic Survey in the 1960s, believed that women could not carry heavy equipment and that Antarctic facilities were unsuitable for women. The United States believed for many years that the climate of Antarctic was too harsh for women.
Antarctica was seen by many men as a place where men could imagine themselves heroic conquerors. In Western culture, frontier territories are often associated with masculinity. Antarctica itself was envisioned by many male explorers as a "virginal woman" or "monstrous feminine body" to be conquered by men. Women were often "invoked in terms of place naming and territorial conquest and later even encouraged to have babies in Antarctica." Using women as territorial conquest is literal in the way that Argentina flew pregnant women to Antarctica to give birth and stake a national claim to the area. Silvia Morella de Palma was the first woman to give birth in Antarctica, delivering Emilio Palma at the Argentine Esperanza base 7 January 1978.
Men enjoyed having a space that was free of women and which, in the late 1940s, "allowed them to continue the kind of male companionship and adventure they had enjoyed during the Second World War." In one news article about Antarctica written in 1958, the writer describes the use of dazzlement: "On the womanless continent, the purpose of the dazzlement is not to catch the eye of a flirtatious blonde, but to attract spotters in the event that the explorers become lost in the frozen waste." Men's space in Antarctica resisted change. In the 1980s, there was an attempt by men to memorialize the "Sistine ceiling" of the Weddell hut in Antarctica as an Australian national heritage site of "high significance." The "Sistine ceiling" was covered in 92 different pinups of women from the 1970s and 1980s. This represented a "male's only club" in which participants believed women would spoil the "purity of a homosocial work, and play, environment." In 1983, the San Bernardino County Sun newspaper published an article about Antarctica stating that it "is still one of the last macho redoubts, where men are men and women are superfluous." One scientist, Lyle McGinnis, who had been going to Antarctica since 1957, resented women in the field saying that "men never grouse." He believed that women complained and needed "comfort." Not all men felt that way. Other men felt that women's presence made life in Antarctica better and one male engineer stated that without women around, "men are pigs." Sociologist Charles Moskos stated that as more women are introduced to a group, there is less aggression and a "more civil culture develops."
Many of the careers in Antarctica are in the sciences and women faced barriers there as well. As women attempted to work in science, arguments using biological determinism, evolutionary psychology and popular notions of neurobiology were used as excuses as to why there were fewer women in the sciences. These arguments described how "women are ill-adapted on evolutionary grounds for science and the competitive environment of the laboratory." Some women described feeling that they were "a bit of a joke" working in Antarctica and felt that men regarded them as incapable.
Antarctic exploration and science research was often facilitated by national navies, who often did not want women on their ships. The United States Navy used the excuse that "sanitation facilities were too primitive" on Antarctica as an excuse to bar women. The U.S. Navy also considered Antarctica a "male-only bastion." Admiral George Dufek said in 1956 that "women would join American Teams in the Antarctic over his dead body." He also believed that women's presence on Antarctica "would wreck men's illusions of being heroes and frontiersmen." Military groups also were worried about "sexual misconduct."
Change was slow as women began to try to become part of Antarctic exploration and research. An article run in The Daily Herald newspaper of Chicago in 1974 described women finally coming to Antarctica as integrating the "land with a definite feminine touch." The article described women's perfumed smells, ways of entertaining guests on Antarctica and the "dainty feet" of Caroline Mikkelsen. Eventually both the "presence and impact of female Antarctic researchers has increased rapidly."
Early women involved in Antarctica
Oral records from Oceania indicate that women explorers may have traveled to the Antarctic regions like male explorers Ui-te-Rangiora around 650 CE and Te Ara-tanga-nuku in 1000 CE, but this is unconfirmed. The first western woman to visit the Antarctic region was Louise Séguin, who sailed on the Roland with Yves Joseph de Kerguelen in 1773.
The oldest known human remains in Antarctica was a skull that belonged to a young Indigenous Chilean woman on Yamana Beach at the South Shetland Islands, which dates back to 1819 to 1825. Her remains were found by the Chilean Antarctic Institute in 1985.
In the early twentieth century, women were interested in going to Antarctica. When Ernest Shackleton advertised his 1914 Antarctic expedition, three women wrote to him, requesting to join. The women never became part of the journey. In 1919, newspapers reported that women wanted to go to Antarctica, writing that "several women were anxious to join, but their applications were refused." Later, in 1929, twenty-five women applied to the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE). They were also rejected. When a privately funded British Antarctic Expedition was proposed in 1937, 1,300 women applied to join. None of those 1,300 were accepted. After 3 years of attempted funding the expedition was cancelled with the onset of World War Two.
Women who were wives of explorers who were left behind "endured years of loneliness and anxiety." Women like Kathleen Scott raised money for their husbands' journeys.
The first women involved in exploration of Antarctica were wives and companions of male travelers and explorers. Women accompanied men as "whaling wives" to Antarctic waters. The first women to see the continent of Antarctica was Norwegian Ingrid Christensen and her companion, Mathilde Wegger, both of whom were traveling with Christensen's husband. The first woman to step onto the land of Antarctica, an island, was Caroline Mikkelsen in 1935. Mikkelsen only briefly went ashore and was also there with her husband. Later, after her husband died, Mikkelsen remarried and didn't talk about her experience in Antarctica in order "to spare his feelings." Christensen went back to Antarctica three times after her first glimpse of the land. She eventually landed at Scullin monolith, becoming the first woman to set foot on the Antarctic mainland. She was followed by her daughter, Augusta Sofie Christensen, and two other women, Lillemor Rachlew and Solveig Widerøe.Bogen, H. (1957). Main events in the history of Antarctic exploration. Sandefjord: Norwegian Whaling Gazette, page 85 Because the women believed the landing wasn't an actual "first," they didn't make much of their accomplishment.
In the years of 1946 and 1947, Jackie Ronne and Jennie Darlington were the first women to spend the year in Antarctica. When Ronne and Darlington decided to accompany their husbands in 1946 to Antarctica, men on the expedition "signed a petition trying to stop it happening." Ronne worked as the mission's "recorder." Ronne and Darlington both wrote about their experiences on the ice and, in the case of Darlington's book, about how conflict between team members also "strained relations between the two women." One of the ways that Darlington tried to fit in with the men of the group was to make herself as "inconspicuous within the group as possible." One man, first seeing Darlington arrive at the Antarctic base, "fled in fright, thinking that he'd gone mad." Both women, upon returning from Antarctica, downplayed their own roles letting "their husbands take most of the honour."
In 1948, the British diplomat, Margaret Anstee, was involved in the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey (FIDS) and helped make policy for the program.
Further exploration and science
Women scientists first began researching Antarctica from ships. The first woman scientist, Maria V. Klenova of the Soviet Union, worked on the ships Ob and Lena just off the Antarctic coastline in 1955 to 1956. Klenova's work helped create the first Antarctic atlas. Women served on Soviet Union ships going to Antarctica after 1963. The first women to visit a US station and the first to fly to Antarctica were Pat Hepinstall and Ruth Kelley, Pan Am flight attendants who spent four hours on the ground at the McMurdo Station on 15 October 1957.
Often women going to Antarctica had to be approved in both official and unofficial ways. An early candidate for becoming one of the first women scientists to go to Antarctica was geologist Dawn Rodley. She had been approved of not only by the expedition sponsor, Colin Bull, but also by the wives of the male team-members. Rodley was set to go in 1958, but the United States Navy, who were in charge of Operation Deep Freeze, refused to take her to Antarctica.
The Navy decided that sending a four-woman team would be acceptable and Bull began to build a team including Lois Jones, Kay Lindsay, Eileen McSaveney and Terry Tickhill. These four women were part of the group who became the first women to visit the South Pole. Jones's team worked mainly in Wright Valley. After their return, Bull found that several of his male friends resented the addition of women and even called him a "traitor".