San Jose Mercury News: Bay Area sent two women on first climb to the top of the world. Another never came back.
From the San Jose Mercury News
It did not exactly rival George Mallory’s epic rejoinder when the British mountain climber was asked why he wanted to scale Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.”
But the slogan that Bay Area women who were part of an American climbing team splashed on fundraising T-shirts for the first all-female assault on one of the world’s tallest peaks captured the spirit of the feminist movement – and their expedition – in 1978: A woman’s place is on top/Annapurna.
Just as women were beginning to test the so-called glass ceiling in the workplace, 10 intrepid women broke through the ice ceiling, ascending one of the 8,000-meter peaks that beckon many serious climbers. The expedition was led by Arlene Blum, a biochemist at UC Berkeley, and when the summit was successfully scaled, one of the two women on top was Irene Beardsley, then a physicist at IBM in San Jose. They were not only the first all-female team to climb an 8,000-meter mountain, but they also were the vanguard of the first American team to conquer mighty Annapurna I in the Himalayas…
Bruce Newman