In the early 1930s Antarctic open-sea whaling was booming and a territorial race between Norwegian and British-Australian interests was in full swing. But Antarctica was closed to women, in spite of hundreds applying to expeditions (including those of Scott, Mawson and Shackleton). According to Antarctic historian Tom Griffiths (Slicing the Silence, 2007):
“There was something spiritual about male comradeship, something pure about distant yearning and asexual love, and something incontrovertibly masculine about frontiering. The ice was their own inviolable space. In Antarctica, the presence of women could diminish a man. In their absence, one might prove themselves worthy of them.”
Further, in Placing Women in the Antarctic literary landscape (2009) polar scholar Elizabeth Leane notes that in some early 20th century narratives
‘the continent resembles nothing so much as a monstrous feminine body that threatens to engulf the unwary male explorer’
