Manliness and Exploration: The Discovery of the North Pole

Americans crowded newsstands in early 1910 to read Robert Peary's firsthand account of his expedition to the North Pole. As they read "The Discovery of the North Pole," serialized exclusively in Hampton's Magazine, few knew that this harrowing, hypermasculine tale was really crafted by New York poet Elsa Barker. Barker's authorship of the North Pole story put her at the center of a large community of explorers, writers, patrons, and fans who were taken with Arctic exploration as much for its national symbolism as for its thrilling tales. The fact that Barker was a woman made her ascent into elite expeditionary circles remarkable. Yet this essay argues that it was also representative: women shaped the ideas and practices of manly exploration at home as well as in the field. Peary's dependence upon women writers, patrons, and audiences came at a time when explorers were breaking away from their traditional base of support: male scientific networks that had promoted their expeditions since the 1850s. Despite the "go-it-alone" ideals of their expedition accounts, explorers adopted masculine roles shaped by the world around them: by the growing influence of women writers, readers, and lecture-goers and, simultaneously, by the declining influence of traditional scientific peers and patrons. Barker and Peary's story, then, reveals a new fault line that opened up between scientists and explorers in the late nineteenth century over the issue of manliness, a fault line still largely uncharted in historical scholarship.