Gait Keepers

The act of walking has prompted numerous philosophical and literary reflections, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s solitary reveries and Henry David Thoreau’s spiritual and political considerations of peripatetic life to Teju Cole’s meandering novel Open City. If one is interested in the subject, one notices that many of its proponents are men. Notable exceptions exist, perhaps most famously in contemporary literature Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, from 2000. The spirit of that book seems to linger throughout Women, Walking.

This robust collection is curated around a single notion: reflections on walking by women. It contains universes of discovery within that. Whether a hike, a stroll, a ramble, or an amble, in cities or in nature, with purpose or without, the editors Zahra Ebrahim and Jane Farrow assert, “There is deep significance to be found in an ordinary walk.”

The claim that this way of moving through the world is gendered has...