Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [42]
Helga’s frustration at their slow pace surfaced. The sponsor’s twin stipulations that the women must earn their own way across and meet a time deadline placed them in a double bind. With the journey only half completed and just over two months of time remaining, being bound by their contract to “not receive a cent in aid of their own expenses” was proving unworkable.11 The pattern of staying in a town for a few days to earn their own way by washing, scrubbing, or cleaning houses simply took too long.
Somewhere in Colorado, Clara fell on rocks. She severely sprained her ankle, which caused a ten-day delay and further risked their ability to fulfill the contract.12 With the December deadline looming, they needed to find a faster way to earn their travel expenses. Time was getting short.
Helga and Clara saw an abundance of natural beauty in the American landscape, such as the front range of the Rocky Mountains at Pikes Peak near Colorado Springs.
Courtesy Colorado Historical Society,
photo by Wm. H. Jackson, CHS-J2902, 20102902.
Detail of this photograph on this page.
Their trek out of Colorado Springs took them past the splendor of Pikes Peak, where the early morning sun cast a purple hue over the imposing mountain. Returning to Denver, they cut through the northeast part of Colorado, following the rails to Omaha.
As the ordinary and the famous citizens of America began to learn about the Estby women’s achievement, the sheer audacity of their accomplishment disputed the validity of the commonly held beliefs that women were physically inferior to men, they were a weaker sex that must be protected, and that biology was destiny. Victorian restraints emphasized that the female body should always be covered, that ladies must never sweat, and that physical exertion should take place in private. When women pedaled or walked the streets without corsets or padded clothing, and shortened their skirts, they broke with genteel conventions.
In the mid-1870s, a few women challenged these assumptions when they competed as pedestrian endurance walkers in women’s footraces, performing before large crowds in America’s major cities. Two such female athletes, American Mary Marshall and German Bertha von Hillern vied against each other in six-day walking races in Chicago and New York, which drew thousands of spectators. Von Hillern continued solo exhibits of walking one hundred miles around a track in thirteen cities, and one time performed the extraordinary feat of walking 350 miles in six consecutive days and nights.13 The Woman’s Journal, a leading women’s suffrage newspaper, asserted that her accomplishments refuted Victorian beliefs and medical claims that women were too frail to be full citizens.14
In 1878, a middle-aged performer, Ada Anderson, began walking exhibitions. Rather than the one-day walks of von Hillern, hers lasted almost a month and spanned hundreds of miles as she circled a track in the Mozart Garden in Brooklyn. In Chicago, Anderson’s exhibition sold more than 24,000 tickets to fans wanting to watch her spectacular proof of women’s strength.15 By 1879, more than one hundred women were walking for money and hundreds of newspapers chronicled these endurance efforts.
For a brief period, women suffragists saw these walkers as symbols for women’s rights and the sport received a measure of legitimacy. But the challenge to Victorian morality upset temperance and religious leaders who considered the women pedestriennes as disreputable. “Our modern female pedestrians are a disgrace to themselves and dishonor to society,” claimed a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, “and an outrageous insult to every virtue which adorns true womanhood.”16
Controversy also arose over the public brutality of such sporting exhibitions sometimes promoted by unscrupulous, profit-hungry managers,