Life and Death on Mt. Everest by Sherry B. Ortner

Author:Sherry B. Ortner [Ortner, Sherry B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780691211770
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE ENTRY OF WOMEN: SEVENTIES SEXISM AND SENSITIVITY

Although there had been women climbing in the Himalayas earlier, it was only in the seventies, in relation to the emergence of the feminist movement, that women entered the sport in significant numbers. There were both coed expeditions, like the Nanda Devi one just discussed, or the 1976 American Bicentennial expedition; there were also all-women’s expeditions, like the 1975 Japanese women’s expedition that put the first woman, Junko Tabei, on the summit of Everest, or the 1978 Annapurna women’s expedition led by Arlene Blum, discussed briefly earlier. (I will have much more to say about all this in the next chapter, which will be entirely devoted to the “woman question,” but I introduce it here to consider the ways in which it entered into the sahibs’ countercultural perspectives in the seventies.)

In some cases, the reactions of male climbers to the entry of women were largely negative—resistant, hostile, threatened. Indeed, the seventies produced some of the most intensely sexist rhetoric of the whole century—something I was at first surprised to discover in the reading and then realized that it made sense: women seemed to be, and in many ways were, challenging the whole social contract of gender relations, and this was indeed very provocative at the time.

At the same time a more “sensitive” discourse also began to appear in the mountaineering literature. By sensitive discourse in the gender arena, I mean a discourse that recognizes the importance of men monitoring their own machismo, and of making a conscious attempt not to slight women. Two climbers who spoke a relatively “sensitive” language about women in this era were Peter Boardman and Ned Gillette. Peter Boardman, who was critical of the competitiveness among male climbers, also wrote about struggling with his own traditionally gendered impulses, in the context of climbing with his wife, Hilary:

I was becoming angry with Hilary, the mountain, the rain and wind and myself. I tried to rationalise and channel my frustration into energy. . . . “Why does she always seem to move so slowly when the going gets rough? Why do I shout at her and long for an equal? I’d never do that to any other climbing partner—it’s unfair, it’s not that serious a situation.”42

Ned Gillette and his wife, Jan Reynolds, were former Olympic cross-country skiers. They undertook a major trek/climb/ski expedition around Mount Everest in 1982, and wrote a joint book about it.43 Their book was clearly an attempt to create even textual equality, consisting of excerpts from both of their diaries and sections alternately written by each of them. Reynolds was explicitly feminist in her expectations of equality on the expedition, and critical of displays of male dominance.44 And Gillette struggled, as Boardman did, with his own tendencies to either dominate his wife or to slight her. The couple had met an old (male) climbing friend, and Ned started to move ahead with him:

“Hold on,” Jan shouted. “No way can I move that fast in this light.”

“Just stay on the stream,” I yelled back.

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