It may come as no surprise that as the wife of legendary Everest climber George Mallory, Ruth Mallory was a climber herself. Born in 1892 to an upper-middle-class family, and at a time where women had limited rights, Ruth did not have a classical education. However, she eventually trained to be a Montessori teacher, a system that did not distinguish between girls and boys, as she was passionate about both sexes having an equal education. Despite her husband’s initial skepticism and her father’s cruel teasing, she was determined to ensure her children should not have an ‘experimental education’ as she had, wanting her daughters to be able to stand on their own feet, and was hopeful to start her own Montessori class following her training.

Ruth wasn’t a suffragette, but she wanted to empower women to become economically independent of men; ‘to earn their own living decently’. Nine days after the Representation of the People Act 1918 was passed, Ruth told George that if she was voting ‘I should vote coalition’. Ruth’s aunt, Theodora Powell, established the Guildford branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1909. Ruth, like her mother May, seems to have focused on empowerment through enabling women to achieve financial independence rather than on politics with a capital P. The Turners’ stance on feminism (as embroidered on the 1908 suffragist march banners by Ruth’s aunt Christiana Jane Herringham née Powell) was ‘Alliance not Defiance’.

In another anecdote, on 5 November 1918, Ruth admitted that she ‘simply roared with laughter when [she] read the parliamentary discussion about whether women should sit in parliament or not’. A Mr Hobhouse ‘asked what would happen if the Prime Minister were a woman and were in that state that every loving wife should be.’ If a woman can climb and have babies, a woman could surely balance politics and family. Isn’t it ridiculous and childish of people to talk like that …’ concluded Ruth.

Ruth did not want women to be confined to a domestic sphere. She wanted women to be equal to men, or she would not have kept up her membership of the Women’s Guild of Arts, or joined the Pinnacle Club. The difference between those two feminist groups was that only the Pinnacle Club involves danger.

Having honed his climbing skills in the Alps and English Lake District, George had been Ruth’s introduction to climbing, originally planning their honeymoon as a climbing trip. However, climbing mountains was considered by many to be a kind of madness at this time. Indeed, Queen Victoria herself had tried to ban it due to the amount of fatalities. It follows for the time that it should be particularly unnatural for women to partake in such a hobby, but six years after the first ascent of the Matterhorn, Lucy Walker became the first woman to climb the mountain, in 1871. She claimed she never felt her life to be in danger.

Women climbers were still treated as fragile though, and at the Ladies’ Alpine Club, established in 1907, they liked to tell the story of some cousin with Alpine experience who took a party of ladies to climb Tryfan in Snowdonia. He insisted on testing every boulder before the ladies stepped on it. He was so thorough that the ladies got tired of waiting. Eventually they carried on up the mountain leaving him to test alone.

After the devastating losses of the First World War, there were fewer men available to take women climbing. Pat Kelly founded the Pinnacle Club, the first all-female rock climbing club in Britain, because she became tired of having to wait patiently for a man to become available. Once, in the Lake District, sick of waiting, she soloed Owen Glynne Jones’s route up Scawfell Pinnacle from Deep Ghyll. After the initial shock, the men suggested that solo climbing might not be the only way of dispensing with the requirement for a man. With Geoffrey and Len Winthrop Young’s encouragement, Pat wrote a letter to The Manchester Guardian proposing an all-female rock climbing club.

Like Ruth, Pat Kelly, the club’s founder has only been climbing for seven years. She worked with her husband, a clerk in an insurance firm in Manchester. They did not have children. Pat may have made a deliberate decision not to. Following the death of her mother, Pat spent her young adult life as a guardian of her younger siblings. Now, Pat choses to climb. As her husband later observed: ‘she called [the Pinnacle Club] more than once, her child’

Ruth met Pat Kelly at Pen-y-Pass. Slight and smiley, Pat is according to Geoffrey ‘an entirely generous person’. On a rock face she moves with a deftness and a lightness that is extraordinary. Ruth admires Pat’s breed of feminism. Pat simply wanted to ‘stand on her own feet without in any sense wishing to compete with or outrival the male sex …’

Ruth was the tenth member of the still thriving Pinnacle Club. She filled out the application form on 7 March 1921. The list of climbing routes on the form was extensive, from her strenuous mid-winter novitiate in 1914, to spring 1921. Four years of her climbing life are against a background of world war. Most of the climbs were done when George was home on leave. During this time she had been pregnant for twenty-seven months and breast feeding for eighteen. But Ruth had balanced the danger inherent in childbirth with the danger of war and somehow, the equation resolved in favour of embracing the danger inherent in climbing.

The qualification for the Pinnacle Club is that she could lead; that she could go first. Ruth could not only lead but even put up a new route: a first ascent. Setting her pen on the paper Ruth wrote: ‘Skye 3 days climbing – Sgùrr nan Gillean, Bartair Tooth & other unremembered names including a first ascent.’

Ruth was motivated by physical challenge and by using her body, more than a summit or abstract heroics – ‘unremembered names’ – sums up her attitude well.

Behind Everest is available to order here.