Discusses the lives and accomplishments of five women who traveled and explored the mountainous regions of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The story of Canadian women who felt the pull of the mountains and climbed some of the highest peaks wearing woollen knickers and hobnail boots.

Canadian women have been conquering mountains for more than 100 years. The early pioneers set the standard for the women who followed. This group of extraordinary women include the founder of the Alpine Club of Canada and the first North American woman to summit Everest. These women were all strong and determined, and shared a love of adventure.

A thirst for adventure, a deep desire to push themselves beyond their comfort zones, and an innate curiosity about the world and its peoples drive the biographies of the ten women explorers profiled here. As explorers they bring skills in cartography, geography, history, anthropology, botany, photography, linguistics and writing to their travels. Their stories begin with Sacagawea, a Native guide in the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805, and end in the present, with Mattie McNair and Denise Martin, the Canadian leaders of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. These are stories of women who dared to push beyond the safety of their own communities in order to live their dreams.

In “Hidden in History: The Untold Stories of Female Explorers and Adventurers,” travel the globe — and history. While it’s fairly common to have women researchers, pilots, and captains in the 21st century, this was not always the case. Exploring and adventuring, even in the name of science and research, were privileged activities reserved solely for men. But some women just couldn’t stay put, even when faced with the harsh resistance of those who favored the norm. These women broke with convention and trekked into the unknown, paving the way for women of today to seek adventure as they see fit. In 1766, Jeanne Baret performed botanical research as she made a complete voyage around the world, making her the first woman ever recorded to do so. Marguerite Hay Drummond-Hay became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe from the sky when she flew around the world in a zeppelin prior to World War II. Louise Arner Boyd traveled to the Arctic in 1926 –– a hard journey even in modern times. Now we have women like Sylvia Earle, a world-renowned oceanographer and the first woman to walk on the ocean floor, and Barbara Hillary, the first woman of color to travel to both the North and the South Pole. With this installment in the Hidden in History series, readers can explore for themselves the exciting stories, harrowing adventures, and meaningful research conducted by these daring women. No longer forgotten in the past, the adventurous women of yesterday can once again inspire tomorrow’s explorers to chart their own expeditions into the great unknown.

Presents brief biographies of five women who risked their lives to travel around the world for adventure and to achieve career goals.