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Women’s history month is crucial in giving life to the movement, spreading awareness, and celebrating those who made the progress we benefit from today. But writing women’s history is a challenging task. I had the pleasure of speaking with author and historian Katherine MacInnes, whose book ‘Snow Widows’ is soon to be released. She reconstructs the lives of the women behind the five explorers who died during the 1910 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole.
‘Snow Widows’ epitomises the challenge of being an historian of women’s history as there is comparatively little documentation, and the surviving archives are few and far between. Katherine acknowledged just how difficult it is to unearth the truths of these invisible figures. She explained how being a women’s historian requires a different approach; she pieces together the histories of her five protagonists from fragmented archives of diaries, letters and even accounts books.
Katherine began by showing me the iconic image of the five explorers (above), explaining the powerful effect it had on her. She visualised her protagonists as literally standing, hidden, behind their male counterparts.
'No man is an island'
Captain Scott led the expedition to Antarctica, yet his campaign was spearheaded by his powerful wife Kathleen. Oriana Wilson worked alongside her husband as a scientist, but after he died in the expedition, she achieved a CBE in her own right. The animals she discovered were named in her honour. Caroline Oates stepped in to run her son’s Suffolk estate, displaying an agile business mind and employing hundreds of men who had to answer to her. Emily Bowers was a matriarchal figure and head mistress, who remains invisible despite the widespread influence her education would have had. Most invisible of all is Lois Evans, who survived by scraping cockles on South Wales beaches whilst her husband was away and after his death. As a working class woman, her life opportunities would have been cut short at birth. Captain Scott never even considered meeting her when he entertained the ‘wives’ before departing for the South Pole, revealing the intersection between sexism and classism that has existed throughout time and still does.
Each of Katherine’s ‘snow widows’ speak for the women who have, throughout history, been figureheads for the better known men in their lives, a role that has for so long characterised the female existence (think Penelope and Odysseus!). A symbolic figurehead - a statue of a woman with her hand outstretched towards the horizon - stood on the hull of Captain Scott’s ship. The ‘snow widows’ themselves provided this source of inspiration and perseverance, evident in the letters sent home from the South Pole. Whilst the ‘official line’ kept up appearances for the media, in their personal letters the five explorers offloaded about the social tensions and challenges of the expedition. Our five women were the lucky recipients!
Katherine’s book reveals much about the individual lives of these women, entwined as they were with the history of the expedition itself. ‘Snow Widows’ also speaks more widely of the early 20th century as a contentious period in women’s history. The Suffragette movement was becoming widely acknowledged, but as it grew, so did critical, anti-suffrage ideology. Among Katherine's women were active supporters of the anti-suffrage movement, a realisation that both disappointed and intrigued me. As modern day feminists, how can we understand why women wouldn’t have campaigned for equal voting rights? It seems obvious to apply, perhaps anachronistically, the theory of internalised misogyny. These women were raised in the 'awkward phase' of women's history; despite being Edwardian women, they were raised under strict Victorian values, and may not have felt their gender worthy of political power.
Katherine suggests that rather than wholly answering these questions, her book offers a realistic cross-section of women living in a deeply divided society. Her aim was to "place the stories in their historical context and let the women speak for themselves".
On the 15th June 1913, the Terra Nova returned to Cardiff Harbour to a huge fan fair, despite the fact that Scott and his companions had perished after reaching the pole. The government funded trains from London to Wales for the celebration. Conveniently, this averted attention away from a seminal event in women’s history that occurred on the same day: Emily Davison's funeral and the 5,000 suffragettes that accompanied her to her resting place.
Thank you to Katherine MacInnes for speaking with me. Preorder 'Snow Widows' here - it comes out on the 14th April. Sara Wheeler's review for The Spectator is also an interesting read!
Anna Emmett Martin