Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation

by Tiya Miles, 2023. Paperback, 192 pages.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Publishers Weekly and New York Public Library Best Book of 2023

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.

About the Author

Tiya Miles is the author of three multiple prize-winning works in the history of early American race relations: Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom; The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story; and most recently, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.

She has also written historical fiction: The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), shared her travels to "haunted" historic sites of slavery in a published lecture series, and written various articles and op-eds (in The New York Times, CNN.com, the Huffington Post) on women’s history, history and memory, black public culture, and black and indigenous interrelated experience.

She is a past MacArthur Foundation Fellow (“genius award”) and Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow and a current National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award recipient. She taught on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years and is currently a Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Tiya was born and raised in Cincinnati, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, three children, and three pets. She is an avid reader of feminist mysteries, a passionate fan of old houses, and a loyal patron of Graeter’s ice cream in Cincinnati as well as Dairy Queen just about anywhere.