An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America. - (Baker & Taylor)

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Publishers Weekly and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions and Literary Hub

“Thoroughly absorbing.… A beautiful synthesis of diverse women’s experiences, combining history with memoir and a call to action.” —Jill Watts, New York Times Book Review

An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women’s basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World’s Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sacagawea and Pocahontas, and to underappreciated figures like Native American activist writer Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertrude Bonnin, farmworkers’ champion Dolores Huerta, and labor and Civil Rights organizer Grace Lee Boggs.

This beautiful, meditative work of history puts girls of all races—and the landscapes they loved—at center stage and reveals the impact of the outdoors on women’s independence, resourcefulness, and vision. For these trailblazing women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods, following the stars, playing sports, and taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only joyful pursuits, but also techniques to resist assimilation, racism, and sexism. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, Wild Girls evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them—and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race and class today.

A National Book Award–winning, New York Times best-selling historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women’s basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World’s Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls also brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sakakawea and Pocahontas, and to underappreciated figures like Gertrude Bonin, Dolores Huerta, and Grace Lee Boggs.

For the girls at the center of this book, woods, prairies, rivers, ball courts, and streets provided not just escape from degrees of servitude, but also space to envision new spheres of action. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, this book evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them—and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for girls of every race and class today.

Booklist Reviews

In this unique and compelling entry in the Norton Shorts series (described as "brilliance with brevity"), historian and author Miles (All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, 2021) reconsiders women in American history and their interactions with the natural world. With Harriet Tubman, Louisa May Alcott, and Sacagawea anchoring the narrative, Miles turns to a host of their lesser-known contemporaries to consider kinships between women and the wild. Drawing heavily on published works about her subjects, as well as their own books, letters, and diaries, she reveals how relationships with the outdoors impacted women's lives in the past while reflecting on how cultural assumptions about femininity and race affected the development of those relationships. The personal stories range from intriguing to downright inspiring—the Native American players of the Fort Shaw basketball team deserve a movie!—but it is the author's insatiable curiosity and obvious affection for her subjects that will most captivate readers. So many fascinating women of different races are included in this little book. It's a true treasure! Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

Author of the National Book Award—winning, New York Times best-selling The Things She Carried, Miles profiles young women in U.S. history shaped by their emersion in the natural world, with results significant to us all. For instance, Harriet Tubman learned about terrain when she was forced to labor outdoors, which eventually facilitated escape from enslavement for herself and others, while Louisa May Alcott's passion for running through fields and forests helped her circumvent gender expectations in rigid New England. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2023 Library Journal