Manless Rope Team

While women have been known to climb mountains since the nineteenth century, mountaineering is still perceived by many as a ‘bastion of virility’. Yet, from the post-First World War period until today, French women mountaineers have discovered and organized a novel and atypical experience: climbing in manless rope teams to meet their unsatisfied social needs for independence, equal rights, and acknowledgment of their capacities. A socio-technical history of the innovative manless rope team reveals three distinctive periods, characteristic of the different waves of feminism. The history of this innovation illuminates how women mountaineers contributed to reducing a number of inequalities (access, treatment, and recognition) through the extension of a network of resources (human and material). From the rare, scattered, and invisible individual initiatives of the first half of the twentieth century to an attractive dynamic currently supported by alpine institutions and organizations (industry, media, politics), the recent success of the manless rope team is nevertheless paradoxical. It reflects both a change in society and compromises with the gender system that sometimes change the initial emancipatory project

Archaeology · Climbing · Feminism · Independence (probability theory · Mountaineering · Political science · Politics · Rope · Sociology · Virility · Engineering · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law

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