Grace and Grit

From 1910-1916, women such as Blanche Stuart Scott, Della Crewe, Effie and Avis Hotchkiss, Adeline and Augusta Van Buren, Rachel Foster Avery and other daring adventurers were not deterred from pursuing and achieving their dreams of traveling across America and exploring the world around them in spite of daunting physical and social road blocks. By car, plane, and motorcycles they did what few others dared, and accomplished feats worthy of story telling a century later. In a world very different from our paved and pampered world today, large portions of the planet were still unexplored and even the settled places were predominantly rural and undeveloped. Explorers still made headlines by going where no person had ever gone before. It was an especially remarkable period of history for those women whose stories are told in this book; young women who held the dream, fortified their courage, endured pain, lost hope, found hope and met their goals. Being the first to accomplish an exploratory feat was difficult enough for men who enjoyed the support of society at large, but for these women the feat was tougher, longer, harder, but history making. This book is the first to tell the stories of several of these women in the detail and context necessary to truly appreciate their deeds. Considering their accomplishments within the realities and conditions of an early twentieth-century America-the great frontier period - we marvel at the human spirit's irrepressible force to explore, create, and push back boundaries that limit the human experience. Hats off to these women's grace and true grit.