Abstract

Discussions of dangerous sport have not taken significant account of sex-based differences in experience or value of sport. This paper discusses the importance of such pursuits for the development of women’s autonomous selfhood and capacity for agency, through the philosophy of de Beauvoir and her recounting of her own hiking experiences. This is combined with observations from Rachel Hewitt’s In Her Nature concerning women’s contemporary experiences and those of nineteenth-century women alpinists, and discussing the reasons for the erasure of the accomplishments of early female amateur sportspersons. The paper considers the importance of risk/test for the discovery of self and the way in which metaphysical presumptions about women’s capacity for self-transcendence and the attainment of fully autonomous agency has affected a more general view about the relative (un)importance of the development of woman’s independent physical expression, especially through sport. It is argued that woman’s existential authenticity is facilitated through both her own autonomy of action in relation to others in the social world and in realising her own body as for-herself as opposed to only or primarily as for-others. Both, but particularly the latter, are enhanced by participation in demanding outdoor, individual-centred, especially solitary, sporting endeavours.