Solitary Walking as Feminist Practice: Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman” and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild

The American literary history of walking women is largely unexamined, even though women’s footsteps are everywhere— captured in diaries, letters, prose fiction, and memoir. Colonial women walk in captivity in early American narratives; women roam the urban streets of America’s developing cities; some women walk in nature; other women walk urban streets as prostitutes; enslaved African American women walk (and run) to escape the confines of slavery.¹ As Ellen Moers suggested more than thirty years ago in her landmark study Literary Women, “A whole history of literary feminism might be told in terms of the metaphor of walking” (130). Recently literary critics have worked to capture more of this history but have fixed their attention on the figure of the flâneuse, the female version of the flâneur, the male urban walker who represents the anxiety and opportunities of the modern city. Such studies do not examine American women who walk alone in natural environments, nor do they consider that Black or white, rich or poor, heterosexual or LGBTQ women’s literary treatment of walking reveals a feminist practice rooted in the rich cultural and social context of women’s literary production. This essay considers the ways American women walking alone, independently, in a Western landscape, constitute a feminist practice. The walking performed enacts a fantasy that is enabled by, and dependent on, the social, racial, and economic status of the women who walk. The fantasy is that a white woman, by virtue of her own two feet and with some material resources, can walk away from family and social obligations and, by savoring solitude, not only heal from her past but enhance her psychic potential as an individual.

Rebecca Solnit, Amy T. Hamilton, and Tiffany Lewis contend that the rhetoric of walking has been embedded in feminist practices for more than a century. A walking woman challenges American social norms since her very footsteps interfere with men’s attempts to control her movements, to keep her rooted and bound to the domestic sphere. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Solnit asserts that “women’s walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive” (234). Solnit recognizes that the history of walking has implications for the history of feminism since men have actively kept women from walking, denying them equal access to a fundamental part of their humanity. After all, “a woman who has violated sexual convention can be said to be strolling, roaming, wandering, straying— all terms that imply that women’s travel is inevitably sexual or that their sexuality is transgressive when it travels” (234).² As Hamilton has underscored more recently in Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature, “where walking opened up possibilities for exploration, physical triumph, and intellectual growth for white men, it was often physically, culturally, and mentally devastating for other groups” (12).³ Focusing on the 1910s suffrage movement, Tiffany Lewis analyzes the ways women’s suffrage advocates engaged in a wide range of collective, embodied activities to promote national voting rights. In analyzing practices like mountaineering and hiking, Lewis asks, “how do political walks and embodied arguments function rhetorically, even if they are not seen, heard, or experienced firsthand? For whom is a collective walking protest significant, even when the performance lacks an immediate audience?” (“Mountaineering and Wilderness Rhetorics” 281). Walking by white women played a key role early in American feminist history; even today contemporary female intellectuals writing about these movements sometimes incorporate the motif of walking.⁴

Mary Austin’s short story “The Walking Woman” provides a compelling perch from which to investigate the meaning of women’s solitary walking and its place in the history of American feminist movements. A figure in solitude and in motion is one of the quint-essential American emblems of rugged individualism, particularly in the American West, and one that becomes...