Publishers Weekly
★ 07/17/2023
With insight and imagination, Harvard historian Miles (All That She Carried) explores the ways in which the natural environment presented “new possibilities” for 19th-century women and girls expected to acquiesce to the confines of a “restrictive domestic sphere.” During the 1820s and 1830s, Harriet Tubman labored in the forests and swamps surrounding the Maryland estates where she grew up. She had rejected indoor work at an early age, having realized it provided her enslavers more of an opportunity to surveil her. Outdoors, she taught herself survival skills that she later used to free herself and others. In the 1830s and 1840s, future Little Women author Louisa May Alcott thrived on nature walks in the New England countryside. According to Miles, Alcott’s nature writing became her “subtle tool of social commentary,” a way of critiquing and subverting prescribed gender roles. Dakota writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin attended an American Indian boarding school in Indiana in the 1880s and later described the Indigenous girls’ “wild freedom” when playing basketball outdoors; their participation provided a double-edged opportunity to accommodate and resist the school’s curriculum, which was designed to erase Native cultures. Miles concludes her evocative and unique study with a chapter expressing concern that growing barriers for marginalized groups to outdoor spaces will hinder social progress. It’s an inventive take on what inspired people to challenge norms and agitate for change. Illus. (Sept.)
Outside Magazine
"The stories in Wild Girls. . . quietly expand the idea of what it means to be an outdoors person."
Elizabeth A. Fenn
"With delights and surprises at every turn, Wild Girls has given me a new pantheon of heroes to admire and emulate."
Lauret Savoy
"Wild Girls invites readers on a crucial journey of insight and humanity, reminding us how each life—whether enslaved or dispossessed, marginalized or privileged—takes place on this Earth. This reckoning with their pasts illuminates possibilities for our future."
Carolyn Finney
"A lovingly rendered and rigorously researched book on girls from our past, from Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott to Delores Huerta and Octavia Butler, who saw possibility in the soil, the trees, the water, and the stars, despite the limitations and humiliations placed on them by others. These stories are a call to action, a reminder that if we lose our way, Nature is a bridge. I, for one, am rejuvenated. What a gift."
Brenda J. Child
"Through incredible storytelling and study, Tiya Miles uncovers how girls and women learned new skills and, ultimately, empowerment and peace through their experiences in the natural world."
Boston Globe
"A book that urges us to see nature — and also girls — differently. Best of all, it urges us to see and celebrate them together. "
starred review BookPage
"Beautiful.… If you, like Miles, were once a girl who found an expansive sense of wonder and possibility in wild spaces, this is a book to savor."
Sierra Magazine
"Captivating . . . These are wonderful, inspiring stories, and Miles delivers them with verve. A winner of the National Book Award and a MacArthur fellow, Miles is a scholar’s scholar, and her capsule biographies are rich with detail and spiked with insight and revelation."
BookPage (starred review)
"Beautiful. . . If you, like Miles, were once a girl who found an expansive sense of wonder and possibility in wild spaces, this is a book to savor. "
San Francisco Chronicle
"[Miles] writes with a palpable and contagious passion for her subject."
Boston Globe - Craig Fehrman
"A book that urges us to see nature—and also girls—differently. Best of all, it urges us to see and celebrate them together."
Nicole Eustace
"A moving meditation on race, history, and possibility; an enticing invitation to seek renewal in green spaces; a rousing exhortation to women and girls to claim freedom in the wild. Tiya Miles offers us a rhapsodic account of nature as a respite from, and remedy for, the failings of society and culture."
Booklist
"The personal stories range from intriguing to downright inspiring—the Native American players of the Fort Shaw basketball team deserve a movie!—but it is the author’s insatiable curiosity and obvious affection for her subjects that will most captivate readers. So many fascinating women of different races are included in this little book. It’s a true treasure! This gem is an obvious choice for teens."
New York Times
"Thoroughly absorbing . . . A beautiful synthesis of diverse women’s experiences, combining history with memoir and a call to action, this brisk, elegant study. . . reframes hard-fought battles for women’s equality through the lens of empowerment provided by the natural world. It begs us to acknowledge the primacy of the earth not only in historical lives but in our own as well."
Outside - Gloria Liu
"The stories in Wild Girls…quietly expand the idea of what it means to be an outdoors person."
Brenda Child
"How did women, especially African-American and Indigenous women in the US, find freedom in the face of slavery, repression, domesticity, assimilation, trauma and fear? Through incredible storytelling and study, Miles uncovers how girls and women learned new skills and, ultimately, empowerment and peace through their experiences in the natural world."
Elizabeth Fenn
"With delights and surprises at every turn, [this book] has given me a new pantheon of heroes to admire and emulate."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-06-02
How women discovered themselves in nature.
Harvard historian Miles, a MacArthur fellow and National Book Award winner for All That She Carried, offers a sensitive examination of the lives of women—primarily Black and Native American—for whom the natural world served as an “imagination station and training ground.” For women such as escaped slave Harriet Tubman, Indigenous explorer Sacagawea, and science fiction writer Octavia Butler, the natural world provided “a space to discover who they were and what they were capable of.” Tubman, who labored largely in fields, farms, and forests, learned how “to listen to, forage, and navigate the woods,” skills that enabled her to successfully liberate dozens of slaves. Similarly, Harriet Jacobs, who was formerly enslaved, saw “trees and woods as places of relief, restoration, secrecy, and refuge.” For Tubman, Jacobs, and white abolitionist Laura Smith Haviland, “nature’s classroom” made them acutely aware of societal and political subjugation and oppression. Miles connects love of nature with a celebration of “wild freedom” in the works of Louisa May Alcott, a self-proclaimed tomboy who loved to romp in the woods, escaping the strictures of Victorian girlhood; and in the writings of Native American poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, for whom the “uncomfortable realities of colonial intimacies” underlay her lyrical depictions of beloved landscapes. When Native American children were forcibly sent to government boarding schools, wrenched from their natural surroundings, many rebelled against the cultural and physical confinement they endured. Among 20th-century women whose lives were indelibly shaped by their outdoor experiences, Miles includes Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs and Mexican American labor activist Dolores Huerta. The author’s own reverence for nature intensified during the pandemic, when her backyard became a place of solace and beauty. Acknowledging the privilege that affords her this space for herself and her family, she makes a compelling plea for fostering “outside equity” to allow everyone to partake of nature’s gifts.
A fresh, graceful contribution to women’s history.
