Josephine Diebitsch Peary

Born in Maryland in 1863, Josephine Diebitsch Peary built an unusually independent life early on, studying at Spencerian Business College and working in clerical roles at the Smithsonian and the U.S. Department of the Interior. She married explorer Robert E. Peary in 1888, but she was far more than a companion to a famous husband.

Peary traveled with or joined multiple Arctic expeditions, including the 1891–1892 Greenland journey, where she is described as the first woman on an Arctic expedition. She also spent a winter in the far north and wrote about those experiences in My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos, giving readers a rare firsthand account of exploration from a woman’s point of view.

She later remained active as a lecturer and author, and her papers preserve letters, diaries, photographs, and other records of a life shaped by adventure, public attention, and debate over polar exploration. She died in Portland, Maine, in 1955.