by Alice Lowe

There was a stretch of time when I opened each week’s New Yorker magazine to the “Goings On About Town” pages to plan imaginary weekend getaways. I would choose a play, opera, or concert for each night of my stay. Mornings were earmarked for long walks around the city, followed by museum and gallery exhibitions. Interspersed with eateries, a different one for every meal, allowing for whims and spontaneous finds, from by-the-slice pizza joints and falafel stands to Michelin-rated and hot-new-chef-du-jour restaurants.

Now the Lonely Planet guide to Antarctica is my fantasy wishbook. No theatres, museums, or restaurants—the attraction is the land. The ice. The penguins. The enigmatic otherness of it. There are adventurous treks and historic sites for visitors—Robert Falcon Scott’s Hut, cited as the world’s least visited museum, would top my list—but mostly I envision savoring the wonder of it all.

The seed was planted several years ago, when I wrote about Sir John Franklin’s doomed nineteenth-century expedition to the Arctic circle. My research encompassed the derring-do of polar explorers and the motivation behind their death-defying expeditions, expanding to include southern as well as northern extremes. Antarctica enticed me, more accessible to the imagination as well as to reality. And to women. I’m not adventurous and have never entertained thoughts of visiting polar regions; my fascination is a nod to another me in another life, recognition of a litany of wannabes or might-have-beens.

When Andrea Barrett wrote about Arctic expedition in The Voyage of the Narwhal, she was inspired by reading, in her youth, about the pioneers of polar exploration. She wanted to be one of them until she was struck by the fact that she couldn’t, that “they were men, and I wasn’t.” I never read about Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen’s ventures to the South Pole, never got vicarious thrills from noteworthy historic endeavors. I was too keenly aware that they were the exploits of men, as alien to me as the being that inhabits the Antarctic party in The Thing.

Antarctica represents barren spaces, unknowns in my life—mystery and adventure, the forbidden, the ultimate challenge. Its aura illuminates my imagination. The more I learn about it and about people’s, especially women’s, experiences there, my sense of it grows, and I lay claim to it, but only with the far-removed familiarity of an armchair traveler. Unlike novelist Jenny Diski, who acted on her curiosity and fascination, augmented by a longing for escape. Rejected by the British Antarctic Survey project—she wasn’t a scientist, and they weren’t interested in writers—she joined a cruise ship tour in 1995. When weather conditions prevented passengers from reaching land, she was undaunted, contented just “to be there, in a white, empty, unpeopled, silent landscape.” My imaginary travels share the symbolism of Diski’s actual but unconsummated voyage.

Men were exploring Antarctica, conquering and reconquering the South Pole, for over a century before the first woman, Norwegian Ingrid Christensen, set foot on the continent’s mainland in 1937. When Ernest Shackleton advertised for a crew for his 1914 Antarctic expedition, three women wrote to express interest in participating, but they were ignored. When a privately funded British Antarctic Expedition was proposed in 1937, 1,300 women applied to join—all were rejected. Women were banned from working on Antarctic land until the 1960s. Too harsh a climate, it was believed; women wouldn’t be able to handle the physical and mental challenges. And their presence wasn’t welcome.

The first U.S. all-female Antarctic team, in 1969, was a publicity stunt by the navy, which dubbed them “Powderpuff explorers.” The previous year, Argentina sent a group of four female scientists, but for the most part qualified women continued to be overlooked for expeditions, despite a 1995 study that showed women to be better able to cope with the environment as well as to create a more civil culture. Perhaps that’s why they were excluded: Antarctica was considered “one of the last macho redoubts, where men are men and women are superfluous.” U.S. Admiral Richard Byrd said, “Little America is the most peaceful spot in this world, due to the absence of women.”

Nevertheless, they persisted. In 1978 the National Science Foundation started long-range planning for facilities that could accommodate a population with 25% women. By 1981, women were close to ten percent of Antarctica’s working population; now it’s more than one-third, comprising scientists, engineers, health workers, techies, cooks, construction workers, and support staff. Women from several countries were members of overwintering teams by 1992, and the first all-women expedition reached the South Pole in 1993.

Women in Antarctica were, unsurprisingly, subjected to varying degrees of sexual harassment and hostility. As recently as the 1990s, they might be labeled whores if they interacted socially with the men, dykes if they didn’t. Women continued to be outnumbered in many jobs, although when Jean McNeil participated in the British Antarctic Survey’s writer-in-residence program in 2008, she reported that all the doctors were women. Even so, one old-timer told her he still didn’t approve of their presence.

Nevertheless, they persisted. Elizabeth Chapman began her “abiding, obsessive passion” for the Antarctic when she joined Australia’s Antarctic Division as a typist in 1954, at the age of 19. Twenty-plus years later, she was one of three women chosen for an Antarctic voyage, spending subsequent years researching and recording the travels of women to the subantarctic and Antarctica. Women on the Ice: A History of Women in the Far South contains a list of every woman known to have traveled south of 60 degrees latitude before 1984, from Jeanne Baré, a valet/botanist on an expedition to the Falkland Islands in 1766-67, to Norwegian Ingrid Christensen, a polar explorer who made four voyages on her husband’s whaling fleet in the 1930s, to Chapman herself in 1976, to Connie Deadie, cook at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in 1984.

Chapman inspired others, who followed in her path. “Antarctica breeds grand obsessions, and an Antarctic book sparked mine,” wrote Jesse Blackadder, referring to Chapman’s work. Blackadder became a writer-in-residence at the Australian research station in 2011-12, further exploring the stories of the first women. She wrote Chasing the Light: A Novel of Antarctica, a fictionalized account based on the life of Ingrid Christensen.

Antarctic fiction was once “the scene of good old-fashioned rip-roaring Boy’s Own adventure straight from the pages of Jack London or H. Rider Haggard” recalls Roff Smith in his chronicle. But, like Blackadder, women increasingly found it an evocative setting for fiction.

In Ursula LeGuin’s 1982 “Sur,” four South American women in 1910-11 are the first explorers to reach the South Pole. They haul sledges loaded with equipment and supplies—including ample allocations of Veuve Clicquot champagne for celebrations and pisco (a Peruvian brandy) for their nightly hot chocolate—an average fifteen miles a day, battling treacherous weather and land hazards. Reaching the Pole is anticlimactic, mission accomplished—they shelter for an hour, make tea, then head back to their base camp, leaving no mark or monument at the Pole. They’re sworn to secrecy, having lied to their families in order to make the voyage. When Roald Amundsen claims victory two years later, planting the Norwegian flag at the Pole, the women remain silent so he won’t be embarrassed and disappointed at not being first.

“The New Atlantis,” another LeGuin story, takes place in an unnamed future when, due to greenhouse effects of pollution, Antarctica might become inhabitable. “I liked the idea of inhabiting Antarctica,” the narrator says. “I thought of it as very empty, very quiet, all white and blue, with a fair golden glow northward from the unrising sun behind the long peak of Mount Erebus. There were a few people there; they were very quiet, too, and wore white tie and tails. Some of them carried oboes and violas.”

Also in the realm of fantasy, Harper Pitt, the Mormon housewife in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, appears “in a very white, cold place, with a brilliant blue sky above.”

Her companion tells her they’re in “The Kingdom of Ice, the bottomest part of the world.” Harper: “This is Antarctica! I want to stay here forever. Set up camp. Build a city….”

The ever-fraught-with-mystery continent is a metaphor for danger in Claire Keegan’s “Antarctica.” A woman watches a documentary, “miles of snow, penguins shuffling against subzero winds” while the stranger she’s picked up in a bar makes dinner. Later, she’s gagged and handcuffed to his bed, wondering if she’ll ever see her husband and children again. “She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.”

Ashley Shelby’s South Pole Station is a reality-based rendering of the daily lives of a team of misfits and eccentrics that occupy the ice for a season. Her protagonist is among the workers who are there either to pursue their professions or fulfill their dreams. Shelby’s inspiration was her sister, who had worked in Antarctica as a cook, one of few women at the time to winter over at the South Pole.

Which circles back to ongoing real-life quests, the encounters and challenges, the “firsts.” Because the playing field still isn’t level, women are still trying to show their mettle, and Antarctica has stood as a pinnacle of achievement. In 1993, American explorer Ann Bancroft and her team became the first women to reach the South Pole on skis. In 2012, Felicity Aston was the first woman to ski solo across Antarctica, 1,084 miles in 59 days. Like women in male-dominated space travel, from the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova and the U.S.’s Sally Ride, the first women to fly in space (in 1963 and 1983 respectively) to the landing of the first woman on the moon, planned by NASA for 2024, women continue to celebrate hard-won firsts in Antarctica. In January of 2023, British army captain Preet Chandri completed the longest solo and unsupported polar expedition, dragging a 190-pound sled on a 700-mile trek in 40 days.

In addition to adventurers seeking the ultimate challenge, Antarctica represents a peak experience for those who long to set foot on the land, to witness and experience the ice, its vastness and majesty. Antarctica may be the means to an end for scientists studying climate change, but it’s the end itself for the cooks and doctors and others who can ply their trades anywhere but choose to parlay their skills for the opportunity to be on the ice. And since the nineties, arts and humanities programs have provided opportunities for photographers and painters, poets and novelists, scholars and historians to visit Antarctica and create projects that inform, educate and entertain the rest of us, the cruise ship sightseers and armchair travelers.

Lonely Planet has me pegged. The guide suggests that before undertaking a trip to the Antarctic, one should consider if they might be just as satisfied watching documentaries or going somewhere else. I don’t really want to visit Antarctica (although there may have been a time when it would have seemed feasible), but I applaud the women who seek to level the playing field. I’m happy to experience Antarctica from the deck of a symbolic cruise ship or here in my metaphorical armchair, filling in the details from the real and fictional accounts of those women (and men) who made the journey themselves.

Works Cited and Consulted

Barrett, Andrea. Voyage of the Narwhal, 1999.

Blackadder, Jesse. “Heroines of the Ice,” in Australian Geography #113, 2013.

Bradfield, Elizabeth. Toward Antarctica: An Exploration, 2019.

Chapman, Elizabeth. Women on the Ice: A History of Women in the Far South, 1986.

Diski, Jenny. Skating to Antarctica, 1997.

Keegan, Claire. “Antarctica,” in Antarctica, 1999.

LeGuin, Ursula. “Sur” in The Rose Compass, 1982.

Lonely Planet Travel Guides, Lonely Planet: Antarctica.

Manhire, Bill (Ed.). “The Wide White Page,” in Writers Imagine Antarctica, 2004.

McNeil, Jean. Ice Diaries: An Antarctic Memoir, 2016.

Rogers, Susan Fox (Ed.). Antarctica: Life on the Ice, 2007.

Semple, Maria. Where’d You Go Bernadette, 2012.

Shelby, Ashley. South Pole Station: A Novel, 2017.

Smith, Roff. “Life on the Ice: No One Goes to Antarctica Alone,” in National Geographic, 2005.