Annie Smith Peck

Annie Smith Peck was born on October 19, 1850 in Providence, Rhode Island, to a wealthy family. She was the youngest of five, raised alongside three brothers and consistently competed with them in games and sports.

[Image courtesy of the Rhode Island Collection, Providence Public Library]

As a young woman, Peck frequented lyceum lectures to hear abolitionists and suffragists speak. Her favorite orator, Anna E. Dickinson, peaked Peck’s interest in these movements and in lecturing as a profession. 

[Image courtesy of author Hannah Kimberley]

The Lyceum movement, named for the place where Aristotle lectured to the youth of ancient Greece, promoted adult education through debates and lectures on current events and cultural phenomena. By 1834, there were roughly 3,000 lyceums nationally. Among the best-known speakers who traveled from state to state on the lecture circuit were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Susan B. Anthony.

[Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/lyceum-movement] 

[Image courtesy of Mschafler/eBay]

British illustrator Edward Whymper was the first to summit the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. Three people in his climbing party perished during the expedition. It is estimated that more than 500 people have died climbing Matterhorn since this first summit.

[Image courtesy of Michigan University]

Mountaineer Lucy Walker was the first woman to climb the Matterhorn. Some other women who scaled the Matterhorn throughout this decade included Meta Brevoort in 1871, Mrs. Alston Bishop and Mrs. Millot in 1873, and Lily Bristow in 1879. 

[Image courtesy of Zermatt Matterhorn]

Despite her parents’ disapproval, Peck pursued higher education and received a degree in classical languages from the University of Michigan in 1878, which had started to admit female students that decade. Her father and mother were opposed to their daughter’s pursuit of a college degree, arguing that she should maintain a domestic life alongside her mother before getting married and educating children of her own at home. In 1881, Peck received a master’s in Greek from the University of Michigan. 

[Image courtesy of Success Magazine]

At age 34, Peck was accepted at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece with a scholarship. She was the first woman accepted to study there. On Peck’s journey from Germany to Greece in 1885, the sight of the Matterhorn sparked her interest in climbing. She began her illustrious climbing career by taking on smaller mountains in Switzerland and Greece, and eventually climbing many  mountains throughout Europe.

[Image courtesy of Library of Congress]

Peck taught Latin for five years at Smith College, one of the first all-women’s colleges, founded in 1871. She left when she realized she was never going to make the same amount of money that her brother made teaching. Peck then set her sights on her previous dream: becoming a full-time, touring lecturer. 

[Image courtesy of Smith College Libraries]

Shortly after her time at Smith, Peck began to give parlor lectures on Greek antiquities using stereopticon slides made from her photographs of her travels there. After 1892, Peck went from parlor lectures to lecturing before organizations, colleges, churches, and in other public places. Her travels and stories about mountaineering gained  popularity and drew large audiences. 

[Image courtesy of author Hannah Kimberley]

After several attempts, at 44-years-old, Annie Smith Peck reached the summit of the Matterhorn in Zermatt, Switzerland, considered one of the most dangerous peaks in Europe. She became the first woman to summit the Matterhorn in pants rather than a skirt. She made her own hiking attire of pants, thinking they would be safer than attempting the climb in petticoats. This ascent brought her fame and in some cases, infamy, due to her scandalous attire. 

[Image courtesy of S.S. McClure]

Peck’s choice to wear pants rather than a skirt or dress on her climbs was a risky one. Even though she wore pants for safety reasons, in this era, women had been arrested for wearing men’s attire. Several papers in various states reported in March 1895, about “a young woman arrested in New York for riding a bicycle in man’s attire.” In Arkansas a few months later, a woman was arrested for “appearing on the streets in bloomers.”

[Image courtesy of The Times of Richmond, VA]

In the late 1890s through the early 1900s, Peck climbed roughly a dozen mountains throughout Europe and Latin America. In 1897, she climbed Mount Orizaba in Mexico, which gave her the altitude record for women. The same year, she also reached the summit of Mount Popocatépetl and Orizaba. Three years later, she climbed throughout the Alps, including Funffinferspitze in Tyrol, and other Alpine summits in 1900. Peck became the official delegate of the U.S. to the International Congress of Alpinism in Paris the same year. 

She went on to climb many peaks in South America  the following years. After these mountaineering successes, she decided she wanted to be the first person — man or woman — to climb the third tallest peak in the Americas, Mount Huascarán in Peru.

[Image courtesy of the Brooklyn College Library and Special Collections]

At the age of 58, Peck achieved her greatest triumph after six painstaking attempts. She summited the north peak of Peru’s 22,205-foot Mount Huascarán. But, she only held the altitude record for a short time. Another woman climber named Fanny Bullock Workman who climbed with her husband  hired a crew of engineers for $300,000 to professionally triangulate Mount Huascarán. In 1910, Peck lost her altitude record to Workman by 2,000 feet. 

[Image courtesy of Fotosearch/Getty Images]

Annie Smith Peck was a household name and America’s favorite woman climber. In 1910, every Singer sewing machine was sold with a package of photographs and postcards of Peck. Additionally, Hassan Cork cigarette company created trading cards heralding the “World’s Greatest  Explorers” — 25 male explorers and one female explorer: Peck. 

[Image courtesy of author Hannah Kimberley]

Peck’s first book, A Search for the Apex of America (1911), was part climbing journal and part travel guide for   foreign investors, promoting South America’s natural resources and commerce between North and South America. Her friend John Barrett, the director general of the Pan American Union, wrote the book’s forward. Barrett noted, “There are few persons better qualified to write a book of this character.” Over the following decades, she wrote several books about her climbing expeditions across Latin America: The South American Tour (1914), Industrial and Commercial South America (1922) and lastly, at age eighty-two, Flying Over South America (1932). 

[Image courtesy of author Hannah Kimberley]

Peck became president of the Joan of Arc Suffrage League and in 1911, planted their “Votes for Women” banner at the top of Peru’s Mount Coropuna. She became more involved in the suffrage movement as it grew across the country. In 1912, she marched in solidarity in the Suffrage Parade in New York City, protesting against the New York State legislature for failing to place a suffrage referendum on the ballot. She was recognized by journalists and quoted in newspapers as a notable figure at suffrage events. 

Peck used her recognition to lobby for the independence of women, saying  in a New York Times editorial: “Well, some of us are a bit tired of having prescribed to us what we deserve or require. We fancy that we are capable ourselves of judging what is best for us. We should like to be free to do whatever we think we are qualified for.”

[Image courtesy of Success Magazine]

American mountaineer Hudson Stuck ascended the highest peak in North America: Mount McKinley in Alaska, which measures 20,310 feet.

[Image courtesy of Project Gutenberg]

In 1919, the House of Representatives and the Senate passed the 19th Amendment, stating that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and thus guaranteeing women the right to vote. After a lengthy period of state ratification, the amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920 and was entered into the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920. On November 2, 1920, over eight million women voted in a U.S. election for the first time. 

However, this right was only guaranteed for white women; African American women and other women of color were restricted from voting through racist tactics such as poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as violence. 

[Image courtesy of the Library of Congress]

The Peruvian government named the north peak of Huascarán “Cumbre Aña Peck” in Peck’s honor. They purposefully included her first name to make it clear that a woman had been the first to climb it. 

[Image courtesy of the Library of Congress]

After her many trips to South America, Peck’s interest peaked in promoting peace and diplomacy between North and South America. After climbing Mount Coropuna in 1911, she began expanding her Pan-American activism, lecturing in North and South America about industry, education, and the movement. In 1912, she lectured in Spanish in La Paz and Buenos Aires about relations between the U.S. and South America. 

In the following decades, she continued to educate North Americans about the geography of South America in her books and lectures. Peck promoted tourism and information exchange between the Americas that was  largely missing or misunderstood. In 1925, Peck was a delegate to the Pan American Conference of Women.

[Image courtesy of A Search for the Apex of America, Annie Smith Peck]

After decades of climbing, Peck made her final ascent at 82 years old. She climbed 5,367 feet to the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Madison in 1932. A woman of many firsts, Peck died on July 18, 1935 at age 84. 

[Image courtesy of the Ralph C. Larrabee Photograph Collection, New Hampshire Historical Society]

Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest on May 16, 1975. After her ascent of Jaya Peak (16,024 ft)) in Indonesia in 1992, Tabei became the first woman to summit the highest mountain on each continent—or what is called the Seven Summits.

[Image courtesy of Wikipedia]

In the spring of 2000, Lhakpa Sherpa became the first Nepalese woman to summit and descend Everest alive, and has reached the summit nine times since—she holds the world record for women. 

[Image courtesy of Michael Kodas]

On July 28, 2017, Vanessa O’Brien became the first American and British woman to climb K2 (as a result of her dual nationality), raising the UN Women’s Flag at the summit. She received the SES Explorer of the Year in 2018 . O’Brien has a Guinness World Record for summiting the Seven Summits in 295 days, the fastest time that a woman first achieved this goal. 

[Image courtesy of Vanessa O’Brien]