Fanny Bullock Workman

Explorer

• Born: January 8, 1859
• Birthplace: Worcester, Massachusetts
• Died: January 22, 1925
• Place of death: Cannes, France

American explorer and social reformer

A tireless explorer and geographer, writer, linguist, feminist, and suffragist, Workman set international mountain-climbing records for women. Her enormous contribution to the body of geographical knowledge was acknowledged by numerous geographical societies around the world.

Areas of achievement Exploration, geography, sports

Early Life

Fanny Bullock was born into a wealthy Massachusetts family. Her mother was Elvira Hazard Bullock. Fanny’s maternal grandfather was Augustus George Hazard, a merchant and gunpowder manufacturer based in Connecticut, where he built up the family fortune. Fanny’s father, Alexander Hamilton Bullock, was a politician who served as the Republican governor of Massachusetts from 1866 to 1868. Fanny had an older sister and brother. Her early education came from private tutors. After completing Miss Graham’s Finishing School in New York, she spent two years in Dresden and Paris, where she became fluent in German and French.

Fanny returned to Massachusetts when she was twenty. At the age of twenty-two, on June 16, 1881, she married William Hunter Workman, a physician. He was twelve years older than she was, had done his postgraduate studies in Munich, and had already traveled extensively in Europe. They had one daughter, Rachel, in 1884. Fanny began hiking with her husband in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was there that she climbed her first mountain, Mount Washington (6,293 feet), an unusual accomplishment for a woman of that time. In 1886, they began taking trips to Scandinavia and Germany. William Workman became ill in 1888, and since they were independently wealthy, he retired from his medical practice without causing them any economic hardship. The Workmans spent the next nine years in Europe, using Germany as their home base while they traveled, leaving their child in the care of nurses or at boarding school. It was during these years that Fanny did her first serious climbing.

Life’s Work

Fanny Bullock Workman, who preferred to be called Mrs. Bullock Workman, began her adventurous career when her husband took her hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. She climbed Mount Washington several times. After her husband retired and they moved to Europe, she began to make her first serious ascents.

Most of the climbing that Fanny did during their early years in Europe was in the Alps. With the help of guides, she scaled Zinal Rothorn (4,221 feet), the Matterhorn (14,780 feet), and Mont Blanc (15,781 feet). These were exceptional accomplishments, because it was unacceptable during the 1890’s for women to do mountain climbing.

Amazingly, she made these climbs wearing the long skirts that were considered proper for women of that era. In fact, throughout the years of her exploring and climbing, she continued to wear skirts as a part of her outfit, though in later years she did begin to wear them shortened up to her boot tops.

Wearing skirts was Fanny Workman’s only concession to the feminine role that was considered appropriate in the Victorian age. She and her husband were adamant in their belief in the equality of women with men. As their excursions grew longer and more complex, they began trading roles from year to year. One would organize the expedition, arranging for all the necessary supplies, pack animals, permits, workers, and guides. The other would be responsible for all the photography and record keeping. Both tasks were enormous. Their expedition parties grew to include more than a hundred people, and many arrangements had to be made long distance via mail and telegraph. The records that they kept during these expeditions included precise scientific readings of geographic location and altitude, mapping, and geological descriptions of the terrain. Hundreds of photos were taken with the best equipment then available—bulky, heavy cameras and tripods that had to be carried in cumbersome wooden cases.

During the early 1890’s, Fanny and her husband began going on bicycle tours, first in Europe and then in North Africa. These journeys were not mere sightseeing trips; they were adventures. The Workmans faced attacks by wild dogs, journalists eager for interviews, bandits, extremes of weather, poor food and water supplies, epidemics of malaria and the plague, and other problems that would have stopped less determined travelers. They began writing collaborative accounts of their adventures, and the first book they published was Algerian Memories: A Bicycle Tour over the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara (1895).

During that same year, the couple took with them the recently invented Kodak camera to the Iberian Peninsula. The book that followed was Sketches Awheel in Modern Iberia (1897). The book recording their longest journey, which they took from 1897 through 1899, was Through Town and Jungle: Fourteen Thousand Miles Awheel Among the Temples and People of the Indian Plain (1904). This trip also involved traveling 1,800 miles in Ceylon and 1,500 miles in Java, Sumatra, and Cochin China (South Vietnam). These books all had many good reviews and were well received by a wide audience.

The part of this longest journey that had the most impact on them was a side trip that they took to escape the intense summer heat while in India in 1898. In Kashmir, they put aside their bicycles for a few weeks and proceeded on foot to see the Karakoram and Himalayan mountain ranges up close. They were so enchanted that they put together an expedition the next year, planning to return to Sikkim to spend two months hiking and climbing there.

The venture in Sikkim was beset by problems from the beginning. The Workmans had never arranged such a major venture before, were unaccustomed to the terrain and the climate, and were unfamiliar with the local customs and language. It had taken so long to arrange the expedition that, by the time they got started, the weather— which had already been unseasonably bad for some weeks—was worsening with the approaching winter, and the days were growing short. They were determined, however, and they set off with their large caravan and staff in October. The couple’s eagerness and spirit of adventure were not shared by the porters and bearers. These workers were used to less-determined mountaineers who did not insist on risking the arduous journey under such dangerous weather conditions or traveling at such a fast pace.

Despite their convictions regarding the equality of women, the Workmans treated their hired workers with astonishing insensitivity. In the Workmans’ account of this expedition, In the Ice World of the Himálaya (1900), they showed that they had not risen above the American social model of the time—racism. Not recognizing the impact of their lack of experience and the environmental conditions, let alone the devastating effects of their leadership style, they placed the blame for the nearly overwhelming problems of this expedition on their perception that the Asian workers were uncooperative and unmanageable.

The Workmans never modified their approach when working with their porters and bearers in any of their further ventures in the Karakoram or Himalayan ranges, and they suffered many enormous hardships because of it. In one expedition in the Karakoram, 150 of their workers deserted, taking huge amounts of staple foods with them.

The work that Fanny and her husband did in their seven expeditions in the Himalayas and Karakoram ranges was remarkable and invaluable, and it included many firsts. Fanny set altitude records—as high as 23,00 feet—for women that went unmet for decades. They mapped uncharted areas, including some of the largest nonpolar glaciers in the world. Their observations were essential to geological knowledge of glacial processes. Their maps were the first records of the watersheds for several rivers in the areas bordering Nepal and Tibet. They wrote five books recording these expeditions—the one previously mentioned and Ice-Bound Heights of the Mustagh (1908), Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun (1909), The Call of the Snowy Hispar (1910), and Two Summers in the Ice-wilds of Eastern Karakoram (1917). They also wrote articles for magazines such as The National Geographic and Alpine Journal.

Fanny’s professional recognition by scholars and boards of geographical societies came slowly. It was not an era when women were accepted as knowledgeable or capable of such undertakings. It was not only the sheer volume of precise data that she had collected but also the documentation of the care that had been taken to collect it that won them over. They may have been swayed also by the length of her career in such daunting expeditions. The peak recognition that she received was from the Royal Geographical Society, where she lectured in 1905, becoming only the second woman to have done so.

After World War I, the Workmans retired for good in the South of France. Fanny was ill for several years before she died at the age of sixty-six in Cannes, France.

Significance

Fanny Bullock Workman excelled as an explorer, climber, and geographer at a time when women were expected to be fragile and helpless. Her accomplishments were recognized by geographic societies and academic institutions around the world.

Because Bullock Workman spoke several languages, she could usually communicate directly with people in many of the places she traveled. She delivered lectures in several countries in their national language. She was the first American woman to speak at the Sorbonne.

Honors from ten European nations’ geographical societies were bestowed on Fanny. She was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society and was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In the United States, she was a corresponding member of the National Geographic Society and the Brooklyn Institution of Arts and Science. She was a charter member of the American Alpine Club and an honorary member of the Appalachian Mountain Club.

Fanny was an ardent feminist. In 1912, she was photographed at an altitude of 21,000 feet on the Silver Throne plateau in the Himalayas, reading a newspaper. Its headline proclaims “Votes for Women.” She believed strongly in higher education for women, and to that end she willed a total of $125,000 to Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Smith, and Wellesley, which were then exclusively women’s colleges. She believed that women should be granted equal status with men in the scientific, social, literary, and political fields.

In her private life, she and her husband were patrons of the arts. They were great fans of the music of Richard Wagner, literature, and art. The two were devoted to each other, and their marriage was a partnership in both their personal and professional lives.

Bibliography

Hamalian, Leo, ed. Ladies on the Loose: Women Travellers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981. The chapter on Fanny Bullock Workman in this book provides limited biographical information and then an excerpt from Through Town and Jungle, which is about bicycling in India. It is the only book that Bullock Workman wrote without her husband. Her comments regarding the native peoples are careful, detailed, and objective.

McHenry, Robert, ed. Liberty’s Women. Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam, 1980. This volume includes brief but detailed biographical information. No photos or maps are included, and no specific information on any specific expedition is given.

Miller, Luree. On Top of the World: Five Women Explorers in Tibet. New York: Paddington Press, 1976. A balanced, very readable account. Discusses some of the controversy that surrounded the couple’s treatment of the hired workers and guides during the 1898 expedition in Sikkim. Includes studio photos of Fanny Bullock Workman.

Tinling, Marion. Women Into the Unknown: A Source Book on Women Explorers and Travelers. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Includes a chapter on Bullock Workman’s Himalayan climbs.

Waterman, Laura, and Guy Waterman. A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountaineering Adventures, Tall and True. Seattle, Wash.: Mountaineers Books, 2000. Includes a fictionalized exchange of letters between mountaineers Bullock Workman and Annie Peck, demonstrating the women’s competitiveness.

Workman, Fanny Bullock, and William Hunter Workman. In the Ice World of Himálaya: Among the Peaks and Passes of Ladakh, Nubra, Suru, and Baltistan. New York: Cassell, 1900. Their first book about the Workmans’ Himalayan expeditions. The narration is uneven in content, though it is interesting. In it are harsh comments about the workers they hired. Many photos and illustrations are provided. Includes a chapter in two parts, one by each author, detailing physiological responses to high altitudes.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Two Summers in the Ice-wilds of Eastern Karakoram: The Exploration of Nineteen Hundred Square Miles of Mountain and Glacier. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917. The body of this book was written by Fanny, which may account for its warm, personal tone. It includes fine geologic and geographic observations and detailed descriptions. There are also numerous photographs, many of which are fold-out panoramas, of the expedition in progress. Also includes several scientific tables.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Nineteenth Century

July 15, 1806-July 1, 1807: Pike Explores the American Southwest; 1822-1831: Jedediah Smith Explores the Far West; May, 1842-1854: Frémont Explores the American West.