A Woman in Full

LEGENDS Josephine Peary oman A W Full in was hardly amused when her husband, polar explorer Robert Peary, confessed he’d fallen in with an Inuit woman at the dome of the world.

Undaunted, she courageously kept her marriage together and became a best-selling author, retiring to 290 Baxter Boulevard. BY PATRICIA ERIKSON

As a young woman in the 1880s,

Josephine Diebitsch socialized among the literati in the nation’s capital, wearing white gloves or carrying a parasol. Before long, in the company of Robert Edwin Peary, one of Maine’s most famous Arctic explorers, she found herself hunting reindeer hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, sporting sealskin gloves and a Winchester rifle.

Josephine fell in love with the young Navy lieutenant Peary, a Bowdoin-educated civil engineer who indulged his penchant for supporting America’s nineteenth-century expansionism. As he hacked his way through the jungles of Nicaragua, surveying for a shipping canal (later shifted to Panama), Josephine wrote of her devotion to him. In one she pledged: “I will be just as happy with you in Nicaragua as I would be in Greenland and just as happy in either of these places as I would be in New York.”

Peary held her to this promise. As a young man, he’d become infected, metaphorically speaking, with “Arctic fever,” a passion for discovering the mysteries at the top of the world. Three years after their 1888 marriage, Josephine sailed with “Bert” on the barkentine Kite, a 280-ton sealer outfitted for the geographic exploration of Greenland.

Like sea captains’ wives before her, Josephine maintained the role and dress code befitting a lady of her time while on board ship. Ashore, however, barren terrain and temperatures reaching 50 or more degrees below zero required radical modifications to women’s fashion typical for her time.

On one hike in the chilly Arctic summer, Josephine wore a “red blanket combination suit” with a scandalously short, that is, ankle-revealing, hemline. She concluded, “When you (Continued on page 94)

go out in a city, you think more particularly about how you look. In the North, you dress to be warm and nothing else.”

Josephine’s participation on the expedition, as much as her exposed ankles, raised a few eyebrows. The Arctic had long been the region where men “ate their boots,” if not each other. John Verhoeff, a member of the Greenland expedition, quipped, “The Arctic is certainly no place for ‘the Woman.’” Unabashed, Josephine confided to her diary: “[Verhoeff] is an uncanny and very homely dwarf. Nothing gentlemanly about him. There is no doubt that he is not quite right in the ‘upper story.’”

Another expedition member’s presence surprised “gentlemen scien-