Trailblazing Women Book List

Do you want to read about some amazing women? Women who defied social norms of their day to do amazing feats? Have a craving for some serious women power? Check out this list...



1) "West with the Night" by Beryl Markham
Beryl Markham’s West with the Night is a true classic, a book that deserves the same acclaim and readership as the work of her contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Isak Dinesen.
If the first responsibility of a memoirist is to lead a life worth writing about, Markham succeeded beyond all measure. Born Beryl Clutterbuck in the middle of England, she and her father moved to Kenya when she was a girl, and she grew up with a zebra for a pet; horses for friends; baboons, lions, and gazelles for neighbors. She made money by scouting elephants from a tiny plane. And she would spend most of the rest of her life in East Africa as an adventurer, a racehorse trainer, and an aviatrix—she became the first person to fly nonstop from Europe to America, the first woman to fly solo east to west across the Atlantic. Hers was indisputably a life full of adventure and beauty.



2) "My Journey to Lhasa" by Alexandra David-Neel

An exemplary travelogue of danger and achievement by the Frenchwoman Madame Alexandra David–Neel of her 1923 expedition to Tibet, the fifth in her series of Asian travels, and her personal recounting of her journey to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden city.

In order to penetrate Tibet and reach Lhasa, she used her fluency of Tibetan dialects and culture, disguised herself as a beggar with yak hair extensions and inked skin and tackled some of the roughest terrain and climate in the World. With the help of her young companion, Yongden, she willingly suffered the primitive travel conditions, frequent outbreaks of disease, the ever–present danger of border control and the military to reach her goal.

The determination and sheer physical fortitude it took for this woman, delicately reared in Paris and Brussels, is inspiration for men and women alike.

David–Neel is famous for being the first Western woman to have been received by any Dalai Lama and as a passionate scholar and explorer of Asia...



3) "The Valleys of Assassins and Other Persian Travels" by Freya Stark

Hailed as a classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valleys of the Assassins firmly established Freya Stark as one of her generation's most intrepid explorers. The book chronicles her travels into Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran, often with only a single guide and on a shoestring budget.

Stark writes engagingly of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the region's valleys and brings to life the stories of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East, including that of the Lords of Alamut, a band of hashish-eating terrorists whose stronghold in the Elburz Mountains Stark was the first to document for the Royal Geographical Society. Her account is at once a highly readable travel narrative and a richly drawn, sympathetic portrait of a people told from their own compelling point of view.



4) "Around the World in 72 Days" by Nellie Bly

"At the age of nineteen, Nellie Bly talked her way into an improbable job on a newspaper, then went on to become known as "the best reporter in America." The daring Bly continually risked her life to grab headlines. To expose abuse of the mentally ill, she had herself committed. When she traveled around the world in just 72 days, beating Jules Verne's fictional escapade, she turned herself into a world celebrity. "

In this book, the daredevil reporter, Nellie Bly, recounts her real-life voyage where she set the world record for the fastest trip across the globe, beating even the fictional Phileas Fogg.

A "must read" for all those who are intrigued by events that influenced American history. Bly's escapade and her resulting book was the subject of a recent PBS documentary.



5) "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains" by Isabella L. Bird

Isabella L. Bird most famous book is probably A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. Bird's time in the Rockies was enlivened especially by her acquaintance with Jim Nugent, a textbook outlaw with one eye and an affinity for violence and poetry. "A man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry," Bird declared in a section excised from her letters before their publication.

Isabella Lucy Bird (October 15, 1831 - October 7, 1904) was a nineteenth-century English traveler, writer, and a natural historian.



6) "Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers" by Dea Birkett

What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind their secure middle-class homes and undertake perilous journeys of thousands of miles, tramping through tropical forests, caravanning across deserts, and scaling mountain ranges? And how were they able to travel so freely in exotic lands, when at home such independence was denied to them? This book draws upon the diaries and writings of more than 50 such women to describe their experiences and aspirations. Many of the journeys they made are re-constructed - Mary Gaunt's voyage along the West African coast, Mary Kingsley's jungle treks, Amelia Edwards's thousand-mile journey up the Nile and Isabella Bird's ascent of the Rocky Mountains are just a few. Were women such as Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird simply the intrepid blue-stockings of popular history, or early feminists? Dea Birkett aruges that they were in fact neither - dissatisfied with the restricted lives prescribed for them by Victorian society, they sought and found new horizons abroad, and a degree of freedom and respect only afforded in their own countries to men.



7) "East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart" by Susan Butler

The myths surrounding the life and legacy of Amelia Earhart run the gamut from the mundane to the ridiculous. Since her disappearance in 1937, people have questioned not only her actual death, but many aspects of her life, including the nature of the relationship with her husband, the flamboyant publishing magnate George Palmer Putnam, and even her very competency as a flier. Now, with East to the Dawn, Susan Butler offers the most comprehensive account to date of Earhart’s extraordinary life—and finally sets the record straight.The image we have of Amelia Earhart today—a tousle-haired, androgynous flier clad in shirt, silk scarf, leather jacket, and goggles—is only one of her many personas, most of which have been lost to us through the years. Many of her accomplishments have been obscured by a growing obsession with the mystery of her disappearance. As well, Earhart herself was a master of putting on faces: a woman constantly striving for success and personal freedom in the 1920s and ’30s, she could scarcely afford to let on when something was troubling her. Through years of research, however, as well as interviews with many of the surviving people who knew Amelia, Susan Butler has recreated a remarkably vivid and multi-faceted portrait of this enigmatic figure. As a result, readers experience Amelia in all her permutations: not just as a pilot, but also as an educator, a social worker, a lecturer, a businesswoman, and a tireless promoter of women’s rights; we experience a remarkably energetic and enterprising woman who succeeded in life beyond her wildest dreams, while never losing sight of her beginnings; and we experience a woman who battled incredible odds to achieve her fame, while ensuring that her success would secure a path for women after her.Some odds, are insurmountable, however, and this fact became painfully evident on the last leg of Earhart’s round-the-world- flight. In the chapters describing the last flight, Butler deals with and dispels some of the most pernicious myths about Amelia—for instance, that her disappearance was planned as part of an espionage mission against the Japanese. Instead, she offers a less romantic but ultimately tragic scenario: that the Electra’s limited navigational equipment was unable to find Howland Island—a piece of land the size of the Cleveland Airport—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and a great flier died at sea.Butler masterfully renders this portrait of the first lady of aviation in a story filled with drama, pathos, and humor. East to the Dawn is a landmark biography, and will be the definitive life of Amelia Earhart for years to come.



8) "The Face of War" by Martha Gelhorn
Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was a war correspondent for nearly fifty years. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America in the mid-eighties, her candid reports reflected her feelings for people no matter what their political ideologies, and the openness and vulnerability of her conscience. "I wrote very fast, as I had to," she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place." Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same vigorous approach. Collected here together for the first time, The Face of War is what The New York Times called "a brilliant anti-war book."