I wondered whether this book, written by a woman, about five women environmentalists, with praise from three women on its cover was for me but it most certainly was.
I’ve read the words about two of the five women – two who lived and worked in the UK – but I may well get to the other three in due course.
Ethel Ward grew up in a wealthy Sheffield family of scrap metal merchants and the Peak District was her home patch where she trespassed on the grouse moors of dukes. So we get off to a good start! Having lost a husband quickly in World War I she married again, to a Haythornthwaite, ahead of World War II and lost her husband for five years to the army but he returned after the war. Ethel was busy campaigning and coordinating for access to the Peak District moors and part of this battle was with neighbouring Dovedale which seemed to get its nose in front in a race for National Park status but Ethel and friends won through in the end. Ethel and her note taking, letter and report writing, upland stomping, committee attendance and networking was clearly behind much of the progress made, largely because she played a major role in CPRE’s advocacy for National Parks. When the Peak Park came into existence it was widely thought that Ethel, with all her experience, would be a shoe-in as one of the members of its Joint Planning Board but she was, bizarrely (this book says) passed over. It does sound strange, although the fact that her (23 years younger) husband was selected might have something to do with it, for a husband and wife occupying two places on a committee would be avoided by many selection boards. Ethel spent those next few years being influential in establishing the green belt and in fighting development proposals in the Sheffield area so she certainly wasn’t put out to grass.
I felt great empathy and gratitude to Ethel after reading the passages about her in this book and that is partly because she was involved in places that I now know a little but also with issues of protected landscapes in which I am generally very interested. I don’t feel the same gratitude to Evelyn Cheeseman who was a bug collector and entomologist who worked at the Zoological Society of London as curator of insects and as an unpaid volunteer at the British Museum for decades later and was a member of many international expeditions to discover wildlife in far-flung places. But her story is certainly interesting both as a naturalist and as a woman trying to carve out a role in the first part of the 20th century.
The other three women were; Mina Hubbard, Canadian explorer; Dorothy Pilley, UK and international rock climber; and Wangari Maathai, Kenyan tree-planter, women’s rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner. It’s an eclectic choice.
The cover? Attractive but it doesn’t tell me anything about the book. What would? I don’t know, but that’s the publisher’s problem to solve. I’d be happy to have the cover illustration on my office wall but as a cover for this book, I’d give it only 5/10.
Wildly Different: how five women reclaimed nature in a man’s world by Sarah Lonsdale is published by Manchester University Press.
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