Mina Benson Hubbard was the wife of Leonidas Hubbard, who died of starvation while trekking through Labrador in October 1903. Two years later, Mina set out on her own expedition, intending to complete her husband's work and survey the area. She was accompanied by George Elson, one of the two survivors from her husband's party, and three local guides. Leonidas Hubbard had been a professional writer and his widow published this account of her own journey partly in memory of him. Her expedition was entirely successful and she was able to do what she set out to do in the allocated time, with the allocated resources and without any need to describe unanticipated suffering or hardship, which may be one of the less obvious reasons why this book has been excluded from various canons for most of the last century.
As her editor points out, Mina Benson Hubbard is not a polished writer, and descriptions of landscape tend to be factual or dependent on romantic cliché. Because the journey seems relatively uneventful, and because the author is not given to drama, A woman's way has a subtle momentum related principally to the narrator's changing subjectivity. There is no obvious ‘plot.’ It is the insight into the dynamics of the expedition which is initially fascinating here, particularly where Hubbard explores or exploits the issues of gender and race which are the inevitable heart of all critical approaches to ‘“womens” travel writing.’ There are moments of orthodoxy, in which Hubbard bemoans the limits imposed by long skirts and a sense of propriety. The sight of a fish eagle's nest, ‘some sixty feet or more above the ground. . .was one of the very many things on this trip that made me wish I were a man. I could have had a closer look at the nest; I think I could have taken a photograph of it too’ (page 66). This follows close on her assertion that the loss of the pump for her air-bed ‘seemed quite a serious matter to me, knowing as I did from past experience that I cannot sleep on the ground long without growing very tired, when I lose my nerve and am afraid to do anything’ (page 54). There are surprisingly few instances of Hubbard either protesting against the limitations of early twentieth century American femininities or insisting on the special privileges and comforts legitimated by those limitations. Instead, what emerges in A woman's way is a more subtle and surprising understanding of gender on ice.
In Chapter VII, the expedition is halted by prolonged rain. The men climb the hills surrounding the camp to see what lies ahead, ‘and I wanted to go too. Job, however assured me that it would be impossible as the hill was altogether too steep and slippery. . .It seemed such an ignominious sort of thing too, to be an explorer and have one of my party tell me I could not do something he had already done.’ So a few days later, Hubbard takes her chance while the men are making a portage and goes climbing alone. Glimpsing the guides sitting at the riverside drinking tea below her, Hubbard signals her presence by firing her revolver but then sets off down the other side of the mountain, pursued by her employees. The shouting and dismay with which they follow her eventually persuade Hubbard to give herself up, but she and we rapidly learn that this chase is not simply a dramatisation of women's rebellion against domesticity and dependence. The men are white, shaking, in tears, and Elson tells Hubbard, ‘“I was thinking about how you would feel when you knew you were lost. . .And what would we do if you got lost or fell in that rapid? Just think what could we do? How could any of us go back without you? We can't ever let you go any place alone after this”’ (page 92).
So the drama on the mountainside is not just about Mina Benson Hubbard's vulnerability, but about that of her guides. She is hostage to their rules about what she may and may not do, even though she employs them, but they are hostage to the same limitations. None of them can go home without her; if anything happens to her, their only future is as exiles and fugitives. The white, female, middle-class explorer may not be the one who suffers most from the limitations imposed upon her.
The ensuing stories of teasing, joking and a kind of domestic harmony are changed by Hubbard's gradual recognition of her own powers and responsibilities in relation to the other members of her team. Her narrative is likeable and engaging, and would be accessible and interesting to a general readership, but for scholars of identity politics and exploration history this book will be particularly important.
Sherrill Grace's editing is meticulous and scholarly, providing a serious and respectful context for a narrative which, when it has been read at all in the last hundred years, has been seen as a ‘charming’ or perhaps disingenuous account of a pretty widow's journey of recovery. The textual apparatus and specialist tones of some of the introduction contrast with Grace's obvious identification with her subject and the stated hope that this edition will bring Mina Benson Hubbard's work to a wide audience, but for serious readers this is a fine and significant work.
