Fanny Bullock Workman

Fanny Bullock Workman (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1859 - Cannes, 1925) was an American mountaineer, explorer, cartographer and travel writer, best known for her expeditions to the Himalayas and the Karakoram. Living at the turn of the twentieth century, she is remembered as one of the first women to take mountaineering seriously as a professional pursuit, and as a campaigner who argued, in print and in the field, that women belonged in exploration.

Born into a wealthy and politically prominent family, she received an extensive education in New York, Paris and Dresden. In 1882 she married the physician William Hunter Workman, and the two shared a growing enthusiasm for travel and physical exertion. Their first climbs took place in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where American clubs admitted women members, something far less common in Europe.

The couple then spent years touring Europe, North Africa and Asia by bicycle. These trips produced travel books in which Fanny often paused to consider the position of women in each place. After the death of their son Siegfried in 1893, according to her biographer Thomas Pauly, she sought an identity beyond the conventional roles of wife and mother. Toward the end of the decade the Workmans turned to the western Himalayas and the Karakoram, where Fanny took part in eight expeditions over fourteen years. These ventures were ambitious, but they struggled to work well with local porters, and their privileged background did little to help them understand the local population. In 1906 she reached about 7000 metres on Pinnacle Peak, a women's altitude record at the time.

Her legacy lies in combining exploration with public lecturing. She became the first American woman to lecture at the Sorbonne and the second woman to address the Royal Geographical Society. Her advocacy for women's rights and suffrage, alongside her climbs, helped challenge the gender barriers of mountaineering.