29Jul 2020 by KeRaJo
‘These Boots were made for Walking’: What Women Wore to Walk

‘These Boots were made for Walking’: What Women Wore to Walk

This post, written by Naomi Walker, originally appeared on the blog Textile Stories: The Fabric of Everyday Life, and we thank them for allowing us to repost it here. Women’s clothing has often restricted their ability to walk freely and such clothing has then impacted on their freedoms in other areas of their lives. This blog post will discuss how some women overcame these restrictions. Dorothy Wordsworth walked every day around the Lake District with her brother William and their friends, and then wrote about these walks in her journals. Dorothy and her friend Mary Barker were the first women to both climb and write about Scafell Pike. This walk was re-enacted in period dress by Dr Jo Taylor, Alex Jakob-Whitworth and Harriet Fraser in 2018 (exactly 200 years after…
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27Mar 2020 by KeRaJo

Walking in Confinement: Dorothy Wordsworth’s habits for irregular times

This past week has been a lesson for all of us in how to survive in enclosed spaces. The quietness of the world without as many cars, trains, or people seems at moments to be very loud – but there is also a sense of turning back, somehow, to a way of experiencing place and geography that’s mostly out of living memory: one where the local is magnified, because it’s all we can know for now. We are far from the first people to live in this kind of enclosure, and so past experiences have much to tell us about how to stay sane in this new world in which we find ourselves. How do we adapt so that, rather than feeling trapped, we can find ways to expand our…
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