UCLA Center for the Study of Women

By the late 1800s many elite U.S. men and women found healthful exercise, mental reinvigoration, and camaraderie within the country’s rapidly growing mountaineering community. Following this trend, Bullock Workman and Peck first experienced mountaineering not abroad, but at home in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. During the second-half of the 1800s Peck ventured to the range as a young child with her father and Bullock Workman as a newly married woman. Though the White Mountains are quite conservative in height compared to the ranges of their later adventures in the Andes and Himalayas respectively, with their peaks reaching an average of only 4,000 feet, these excursions allowed Peck and Bullock Workman to experience firsthand the rewarding exertion of climbing not only alongside the men in their lives but also within proximity of other women.