What, Pray Tell, Is a Pedestrienne?

Several months ago, I picked up a book, entitled The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson, as a birthday present for my mother. She hasn't read it yet, but I gobbled it down in a matter of days. It's a delightful book, one of the better birthday presents I've given in recent memory. And it was Nicholson who introduced me to the pedestriennes. In Chapter 3, "Eccentrics, Obsessives, Artists," Nicholson discusses the professional walking phenomenon that took the world by storm during the 1870s.

For a brief period in the nineteenth century female walking was a serious sport and a serious business. Large crowds turned out to watch, and successful women earned a great deal of money. Even so, it was an activity that had something sleazy and daring about it: pedestriennes weren't much better than actresses. It was only a passing fad, however. It was superseded in due course by the more exciting, and even more daring, sport of female bicycle riding, and some of the successful female walkers made an easy transition from two feet to two wheels. (76)

Now, the pedestriennes' undertakings were decidedly not your typical walk in the park. Nicholson describes at length the exploits of professional walkers, both male and female. The most famous, perhaps, is Captain Richard Barclay, a Scot, who set out to walk 1000 miles in 1000 consecutive hours--and did so in 1859, on a set course of a single mile in Newmarket, Suffolk. Several women in the States followed suit twenty years later, and took to walking record-setting numbers of quarter-miles in quarter-hours. Exilda La Chapelle (which, for the record, is a wonderful name) walked 3000 quarter-miles in 3000 consecutive quarter-hours. Not only is that a lot of walking, it's a lot of walking without sleeping. Pretty hardcore. For more hardcore walking women, this is a very nice timeline:

http://www.runtheplanet.com/resources/historical/womens-history.asp

And for a more detailed social and political history of pedestriennes, read this 1999 paper by Dahn Shaulis (who also happens to be quite an excellent poet):

http://planetultramarathon.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/

As enjoyable as Nicholson's writing is, The Lost Art of Walking's primary concern is just that: the art of walking. Although he's a treasure trove of historical curiosity (the works of sculptor Richard Long, a conference of psychogeographers in Manhattan, the story Werner Herzog's midwinter walk from Munich to Paris in order to visit actress Lotte Eisner whom he had heard was on her deathbed), Nicholson is not too interested in examining the politics and ideology of walking. Shaulis' article does a much more thorough job of that.

I suppose walking will always be a more political act for women than for men. There are added risks involved, and added stigma to overcome. You have no idea how many people say to me, with great shock, "You're walking alone?" Not just when I'm out overnight, either: even on dayhikes, people are surprised to see a woman alone in the woods. I wonder why people don't react with the same sort of surprise and anxiety when I walk alone in, say, Burlington. Would they worry if I were walking alone on the streets of Manhattan?

There's a good memoir, In Beauty May She Walk by Leslie Mass, about what it means to be a woman alone on the Appalachian Trail. It gets a bit "inspirational" at times, a bit Oprah for my taste, but posesses a good deal of wisdom nonetheless. Let it be known that I haven't cracked the cover of a single Camino memoir yet, and don't plan to until I finish (I do welcome recommendations!). I had hardly read a word of backpacking literature when I set out on the Long Trail last summer, but when I got back, I was desperate for books to read, for words that would help me make sense of my experience. Experience first, theory later.