Women Who Walk

For my women-friends who, like Pyn-Poi in The Night Field, have people raise concerns or eyebrows about them hiking alone, here’s a bit of a 1794 letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to her aunt. It gives me a sense of connection, that we are able to do what we do today because our foremothers broke trail for us, and women who follow us will be able to do what they’ll do because we broke trail for them.

“I am much obliged to you for the frankness with which you have expressed your sentiments upon my conduct and am at the same time extremely sorry that you should think it so severely to be condemned. As you have not sufficiently developed the reasons of your censure I have endeavoured to

discover them, and I confess no other possible objections against my continuing here a few weeks longer suggest themselves, except the expence and that you may suppose me to be in an unprotected situation. As to the former of these objections I reply that I drink no tea, that my supper and breakfast are of bread and milk and my dinner chiefly of potatoes from choice.

In answer to the second of these suggestions, namely, that I may be supposed to be in an unprotected situation, I affirm that I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection, and besides I am convinced that there is no place in the world in which a good and virtuous young woman would be more likely to continue good and virtuous than under the roof of these honest, worthy, uncorrupted people so that any guardianship beyond theirs, I should think altogether unnecessary.

“I cannot pass unnoticed that part of your letter in which you

speak of my ‘rambling about the country on foot ’. So far from

considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post chaise — but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.”