What an All-Female Team to Summit Denali Can Teach Us About Historic Firsts 

In June of 1970, amid the snow-covered rock ramparts of Denali (the true name of North America’s highest peak), six women took their first steps in a historic feat. Led by Alaskan Grace Hoeman and Californian Arlene Blum, they were the first all-women’s team to attempt to summit one of the big mountains of the world.

By this time, the U.S. had sent men to the moon, but women still hadn’t stood on the highest points on Earth. Popular belief held that women were incapable of withstanding high altitudes, savage elements, and carrying heavy loads without men’s help. Like many boundary breakers who, by default, represent not just their own capability but the capability of entire demographics and peoples, these six climbers bore the burden of proving that women belonged in the mountains at all. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

They soundly proved it. But there was still a long road ahead in fully integrating women into mountain culture. Often the act of reaching the goal or accomplishing the feat is the end of the story. Rarely is the downhill side of such peaks much a part of the narrative, although it’s all part of the journey, in mountaineering as much as other arenas of women’s equality. Even when new goals have been reached—voting rights, equal pay, equal employment opportunity—there’s still the monumental amount of work to be done on the other side of the victory in turning those achievements into cultural reality.

We exist in a window of time were people across the country feel that progress in women’s equality has been stymied (after voters chose for President a man found guilty of sexual abuse who ran a campaign dominated by machismo and appallingly sexist language, over a qualified female political leader); or has backslid (after women were all too recently stripped of national reproductive rights they’d held for nearly 50 years). But a look at historic firsts in American culture, particularly in the areas of politics, business, and sports, offers hope: These long roads will arrive at the destination.  

In her concession speech, Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to run for President as a major political party’s nominee, said, “I often say that when we fight, we win. But here’s the thing: sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.” With that line, Harris was nodding to Shirley Chisholm, who in 1972 was the first black woman to campaign for a Presidential nomination. A half century later, Harris, a Black woman, not only secured the Democratic nomination; she won so much of the popular vote that this Presidential election was the second-closest since 1968.

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But that fact, much like the historic Denali climb, has gone largely unsung. Stories of failure often resonate more loudly as proof of whatever narrative it serves the dominant population to reinforce, however erroneous that narrative is—which is why we must celebrate and record the victories on this long road. Rather than being lost to history, stories of women’s participation, fights, and achievements must be part of the popular narrative if cultural integration is to happen at all.

Like the fact that there were zero female Fortune 500 CEOs until 1972, when Katherine Graham was named CEO of The Washington Post. Women still make up only 10% of that list, despite studies showing that a higher gender mix among senior executives and director boards is linked to better stock performance, a higher return on equity, and other economic benefits. Systemic barriers—including masculinized corporate environments with expectations to work long hours at the cost of sacrificing personal lives and family caregiving responsibilities, and board preferences to hire men by default—continue to hinder women’s progress toward equality. Still, that 10% is more than double the number from just six years ago, a jump that should be saluted in service to spurring the next great steps. Champions for female leaders in business say those steps need to include developing pathways to retain women leaders, redesigning work environments for some flexibility, and recognizing that fathers are caregivers as well.

In some spaces, like sports, we’re much closer to the destination than we’ve ever been. Fifty-two years after Title IX, which recognized gender equity in education and almost accidentally applied to school athletics, was passed, the NCAA Women’s Basketball National Championship was widely heralded as the most-watched basketball game at any level in 2024. And not just that year, but in the last five years. Also in 2024, for the first time in Olympic history, female athletes held as many spaces as male athletes in full gender parity. While no woman made the 2024 list of The World’s Highest Paid Athletes—a glaring disparity that must be addressed—all four major tennis tournaments, the World Surf League, Hockey Pro League, World Cup Skiing, and several other professional sports have adopted equal prize money for women.          

A month after the Denali expedition, in August 1970, 50,000 women strode down Fifth Avenue in New York City with linked arms in the Women’s Strike for Equality March that put second-wave feminism on the national map. As TIME wrote in the days leading up to the demonstration, “the new feminist movement emerged out of a moment in which virtually all of the nation’s systems—industry, unions, the professions, the military, the universities, even the organizations of the New Left—[were] quintessentially masculine establishments. The notion of women’s liberation was extremely controversial, and the movement was in its infancy.”

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Had the Denali climb unfolded even a year after it did, in the fevered days of a new feminist wave, perhaps it would have received the honor it was due at the time. Instead, the accomplishment faded into obscurity, unrecorded in our collective national memory. Yet Hoeman, Blum, and their team kicked open the doors of mountaineering for other women. Fifty-five years later, one of the two climbers co-holding the 2024 record on Everest for the most climbs in a single season is a woman: Nepali Purnima Shrestha.

Hard and slow as integration might seem, the historic perspective shows that it will happen—perhaps even faster if we celebrate the progress along the way, and the boundary breakers who made it possible for us to achieve extraordinary heights.