In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors

Product Information

Running facilitates Rachel to experience herself viscerally through her body and gain confidence in her place in the world. As opposed to a woman who accesses her body's experience almost second hand via the eye; how things appear or look which filters how/what she experiences. On 4 August, I am supposed to be running a marathon: my 14th. I would usually spend the days immediately before and after exchanging tips and debriefing with fellow runners, but I lie in bed, staring at the window or sleeping. I let the battery of my sports watch run down. Its assessment of my current fitness level changes from “maintaining”, to “recovery”, to “detraining”. Finally, it switches itself off. I do not recharge it. For me, the hallmark of a good feminist listen is that I find I have to buy the hard copy book as well, realising that I will need it to reference in future, because of the importance of the contents. This is definitely such a book.

My own creative style is essentially collaborative, and draws upon models and source material from a vast range of scholars, archives, disciplines and genres. I hugely value collaboration in terms of both research and dissemination. I was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-UKRI network Women In The Hills, which explores historical and contemporary evidence about the factors that constrain women’s participation in outdoor leisure. Personally, I find it can lead to first-person narratives that are aren't ready or rich enough to be written, combined with relatively weak research - as if hoping that the weaknesses of one will make up for the weaknesses of other. This book was one of these, and I found it stodgy. Rachel Hewitt: A Revolution of Feeling review - from passions to emotions". theartsdesk.com. 10 December 2017. O'Kelly, Lisa (2 April 2023). "Writer Rachel Hewitt: 'Running is fundamentally important to me, physically and emotionally' ". The Observer– via The Guardian.In the event, my stepfather isn’t airlifted to hospital – he dies in an ambulance on the driveway of his home in a village 10 miles south of Cambridge, having developed a pain in his leg while gardening. That is it, I think. Now I have no real family at all. Rachel Hewitt’s writing is always elegant, fierce, intelligent and truthful. No one writes as well as she does about endurance—and survival.’ – Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women So a way of protecting women in these settings is to defend women’s access to sports and the outdoors through centralised mechanisms, like equalities legislation, robust prosecution of street harassment and transparency in the allocation of state funding to men’s and women’s sports. 2. How do you deal with harassment in the outdoors?

I am a prize-winning writer of creative non-fiction. My creative projects are unified by the aim of understanding and representing processes of cultural change, and the effects of change on individuals’ lives; with particular recent focus on changes regarding women’s rights and freedoms. My third book is In Her Nature: On Women, Outdoors, and it won the prestigious British Library Eccles Writer’s Award. Using biography and memoir, In Her Nature explores historical and personal moments when women’s freedom in public space becomes curtailed, and I show how these constraints significantly curtail women’s presence in the public sphere, as well as the effects on individual women’s lives. My first book,the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey, was published by Granta in 2010. It charted the history of Britain's national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, and the lives of the individuals who created the first maps. Map of a Nation explored how conceptions of British nationhood radically changed around the turn of the nineteenth century, and it plotted how such changes reverberated through the ways in which Britons imagined and moved around the country’s landscape. She wrote fascinating diaries about the experience of mountaineering from the perspective of a person with disabilities. She wrote about the geometry of movement in a chaise, the physical experience of being carried down extraordinarily steep slopes and the muscles she had to tense to prevent herself from slipping. It helped me see the landscape and outdoor sports in a completely different way from what I was used to. 4. What was the hardest thing about writing the book? Queen Mary has double success in BBC academic talent contest". Queen Mary University of London. 28 June 2011.

Podcast

If you look at surveys over the past five years, you’ll see that male hostility to women in the public sphere generally is increasing and I think what happens to women in and around sport is a microcosm of that. My father had been unwell for most of his adult life, with an addiction to alcohol that meant I rarely phoned him after six in the evening, dreading the slurring and repetitions. Finally, his body had given up. He had been having chemotherapy for liver tumours for a year. But in early 2019, a new one is detected: belligerent, fast-growing. A vital feminist memoir of life outdoors, underpinned by the depth of historical knowledge that only a true scholar can bring.’ – Kate Maltby, columnist and critic Are we now living through a similar reversal in women's rights or an era of unprecedented liberty? Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from bereavement to belonging, in a world that feels hostile to women. On the way she's inspired by the tenacious women, past and present, who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has been, in her nature. Dreaming o'er the Map of Things: The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles, 1747-1842(2007)