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Women have played significant roles in the emergence of the charity climbing expedition. This study maps key selective historical developments in the evolution of humanitarian, philanthropic, and charitable works involving the climbing community from the 1960s to the present and the formation of the 'climbing-charity-corporate-complex'. In this process some climbers have evolved into 'celanthropists', celebrity philanthropists as the sociologist Chris Rojek has employed the term. Celanthropists are individuals who have come to public prominence on behalf of charitable causes through brand endorsement and philanthropic activisms. Focusing on a range of prominent British women who have climbed Everest, including Rebecca Stephens, Annabelle Bond, and retired Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton, reveals the forms of emotional and embodied labour that have been essential to their ability to climb for a cause and their subsequent heroic reception as celanthropists. Their cases raise important questions concerning the gendering of 'physical philanthropy' and the nature of post-feminism in sport in its treatment of female individualism and the historically resilient ambivalences afforded to women's climbing achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1995, a 33 year-old woman named Alison Hargreaves made her name by becoming the first woman (and second person) to make an unaided solo ascent of the world's highest mountain, Everest. She was constructed as an exemplar of the highest order, a national heroine to be proud of, and in the vein of a series of British female heroes who punctuate the typically masculine narrative of national achievement. By August she was dead, the victim of a violent storm on the upper reaches of the peak they call the Savage Mountain, K2. The focus of vitriolic media attention, Hargreaves was stripped of her heroic status and condemned for the irresponsibility of leaving her two small children motherless, and so opened a national debate on 'motherhood, ambition and risk'. This article explores that debate. In so doing it probes the meaning of heroism, as both a culturally mediated idea of extraordinary actions, and as part of a wider politics of recognition and representation that calls for a consideration of the role of public communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]