International Womens Day 2021

It is International Women’s day 2021 on March 8th and this year perhaps we should particularly remember Liverpudlian Lucy Walker who 150 years ago, on July 21st 1871, was the first woman to climb the Matterhorn.

While that in itself was a remarkable achievement her legacy was even greater; she was the first woman to consistently climb in the Alps and the first woman to stand on at least twenty of the main alpine summits. Importantly she did this when mountaineering was almost exclusively a male preserve. Lucy was the person who broke through this dominance and paved the way for other women to follow.  Her achievements flew in the face of scientific and medical opinion which maintained strenuous exercise & too much education could endanger women’s health. What’s more they distracted women from fulfilling their presumed destiny of becoming good wives and mothers! Lucy’s climbing also challenged the stultifying codes of propriety and etiquette that constrained so much and so many in Victorian society.

In the mountains Lucy and the women who followed her ground breaking example discovered a new way of being; somewhere totally free from constraints, a place where they could relax and just enjoy being themselves. One fellow climber, Frances Havergal, who was better known as a hymn writer, later described what many women experienced,

‘Oh the delicious freedom and sense of leisure of those days! …How we spied grand points of view from rocks above and (having no one to consult, or to keep waiting, or to fidget about us) stormed them with our alpenstocks and scrambled and leaped and laughed and raced as if we were not girls again but downright boys!‘

Lucy, like many mountaineers at the time, always celebrated arriving on a summit with champagne.  That would be a fitting way to toast the unprecedented achievements of this unsung, witty, quietly talented lady on International Women’s Day 2021.