"In nature, nothing exists alone." – Rachel Carson

Welcome to Women in National Parks!

Our team has collected images of women working on and enjoying federally owned, American lands in the hopes of inspiring and educating the outdoors-folk of today and tomorrow!

We invite you to explore the site through the pages for each geographic region of the National Park Service: the Pacific-West, Alaska and Non-Contiguous, Intermountain, Midwest, Southeast, and the Northeast regions. For each region, you will find images and a spotlight on one woman who is associated with that region.

We hope that you can use this site to get excited for your next trip to public lands or to learn about the history of women in the outdoors.

Happy exploring!

A Note About Gender

This site was created with the aim of highlighting the individuals and narratives that have long shaped and accompanied our national parks but which have been ignored as a result of issues of gender. With this goal in mind, the Women in National Parks archive will strive to represent and empower transgender, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary individuals and their experiences of this land, as well. 

In selecting records for this archive, information such as preferred pronouns or gender identity did not accompany the records in their original repositories. As a result, we have here selected images of individuals who are "female-presenting" or who carry female monikers or identifiers in the historical record. We acknowledge that gender identity, and the vocabulary we have used to discuss it, throughout history is complex. Therefore, this archive will strive to honor the identities of all individuals present in this archive as they experience them. Users are encouraged to submit issues or concerns to our Community Feedback form and to provide any information relating to gender identity that they are comfortable with in the field titled "Subject" when submitting to the archive. 

This site was created at the University of Michigan. We acknowledge that the University of Michigan, named for Michigami, the world’s largest freshwater system and located in the Huron River watershed, was formed and has grown through connections with the land stewarded by Niswi Ishkodewan Anishinaabeg: The Three Fires People who are Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi along with their neighbors the Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee and Wyandot nations.

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