‘I’VE NEVER FOUND MY SEX
A HINDERMENT; NEVER FACED A
DIFFICULTY WHICH A WOMAN, AS
WELL AS A MAN, COULD NOT
SURMOUNT; NEVER FELT A FEAR
OF DANGER; NEVER LACKED
COURAGE TO PROTECT MYSELF.
I’VE BEEN IN TIGHT PLACES, HAVE
SEEN HARROWING THINGS.’A close-up of the French front
line shows the rare access
that photographer and writer
Harriet Chalmers Adams had
during World War I. Adams,
who spent decades exploring
the world, was the most
prolific female contributor to
National Geographic during
its first 50 years.
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (TOP);
HARRIET CHALMERS ADAMS
HARRIET
CHALMERS ADAMS
1875-1937
First female journalist allowed to
visit the French trenches during
WWI; inaugural president of the
Society of Woman GeographersIn the 1880s, long before she became
her era’s greatest female explorer,
eight-year-old Harriet Chalmers
traveled through the Sierra Nevada
on horseback with her father. When
she was 24, Chalmers married Franklin
Pierce Adams, and they set off for Latin
America, where they covered 40,000
miles by horse, canoe, foot, and train.
When they returned nearly three years
later, she gave a lecture at National
Geographic and launched a 30-year
career as a contributor.
Adams made it her mission to visit
every country that was or had been a
Spanish colony, and retraced the trail
of Christopher Columbus from Europe
to the Americas. She traversed Asia and
attended Haile Selassie’s coronation
as emperor of Ethiopia. During World
War I, she was the first female journal-
ist allowed to photograph the French
trenches, where she stayed for months.
She wrote 21 articles detailing her
exploits for National Geographic, more
than any other woman published in the
magazine’s first half century. In those
pieces, she criticized the injustices that
she’d observed. “What blessing has
European civilization brought to them,
which they did not already enjoy?”
she wrote after a visit to Peru. “What
have they not suffered in the name of
the cross which surmounts the hill?”
Adams had no professional training
as a geographer and had never been
to college, but her color photo slides
and adventurous travel style garnered
her invitations to speak around the
world, often from organizations that
had never invited a woman in before.
She was the third American woman
asked to join the Royal Geographical
Society in England. However, the New
York-based Explorers Club gave her
and other prominent female adven-
turers the cold shoulder.
Men “have always been so afraid
that some mere woman might pen-
etrate their sanctums of discussion
that they don’t even permit women in
their clubhouses,” Adams once said,
“much less allow them to attend any
meetings for discussions that might
be mutually helpful.”
Several female explorers decided to
form their own club. In 1925 the Society
of Woman Geographers launched with
Adams as president. She served until
moving to France in 1933, where she
died four years later at 61.TRAILBLAZERS 119