Harriet Tubman, forced to labour outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women's basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World's Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls also brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sakakawea and Pocahontas, and to under-appreciated figures like Gertrude Bonin, Dolores Huerta and Grace Lee Boggs.

For the girls at the centre of this book, woods, rivers, ball courts and streets provided not just escape from degrees of servitude but also space to envision new spheres of action. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, this book evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them-and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for girls of every race and class today.

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University, a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and the author of five prize-winning works, including the National Book Award-winning, best-selling All That She Carried. Miles was the founder and director of ECO Girls, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.