Feminine Poles : Josephine Diebitsch-Peary's and Jennie Darlington's polar narratives

From the Eurocentric or Anglo-American point of view, the Arctic and the Antarctic have often been perceived and presented as the last masculine preserves on earth. Outside constructions of the masculine Arctic obviously also disregard the circumstance that people have lived in the region for very long, but there are also non-indigenous women who have spent time or lived in both areas, to begin with usually as companions to their husbands, but in later years as researchers in their own right. Two early narratives about life in the far North and the far South, respectively, are Josephine Diebitsch-Peary’s My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos (1893) and Jennie Darlington’s My Antarctic Honeymoon: A Year at the Bottom of the World (1956). Both women describe life in the polar areas in ways compatible with the gender ideologies of their time. In many respects, however, Diebitsch-Peary’s account presents more radical suggestions for how women might live in the masculine polar environment than Darlington whose conclusion is that the Antarctic should remain a men-only continent