Josephine Diebitsch Peary papers, 1861-2003

Full finding aid (pdf) | Digitized material

Collection Scope and Content

The collection consists of a large variety of historical items, including letters between Josephine and her husband, Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary, from 1884 to 1910, along with material relating to Josephine’s publications and speeches, travel diaries, family photographs, personal and professional mementos, ephemera, biographical information, and documentation of the Pearys’ network of contacts. Items of interest among the artifacts from the Pearys’ lives and travel are pieces of personal and household silver, textiles (some of which relate to the family’s Arctic experiences), and a shotgun belonging to Josephine. Included as well are four scrapbooks containing papers and photographs, compiled by the Pearys’ daughter, Marie A. Peary Stafford Kuhne. These focus on the lives of Robert and Josephine, beginning with photographs as early as 1861 and concluding after Josephine’s 1955 death. 

Biographical/Historical Note

Josephine Cecilia Diebitsch Peary was born on a farm in Forestville, Maryland on May 22, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. Her parents were German immigrants Magdelena “Maria” Augusta Schmid Diebitsch of Saxony and Heinrich Hermann Diebitsch of Prussia. Her father, a former Prussian military officer, eventually became a linguist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Foreign Exchange Department after the family moved to Washington, DC, their farm having been destroyed during the War. The family, including Josephine and her two siblings, mixed with some of the period’s leading American intellectuals and political upper crust.

After her 1880 graduation as valedictorian of Spencerian Business College, Josephine worked for the next seven years in a variety of clerical positions at the Smithsonian and the U.S. Department of the Interior. Though an opponent of women’s suffrage, she was a vocal advocate for women pursuing higher education, intellectual cultivation, and meaningful work outside the home, which she viewed as compatible with (and ideally deployed in service of) what she saw as their duties to marriage and motherhood. She would thread this needle in her own life, especially in relation to her marriage to future Admiral Robert Edwin Peary (1856-1920), which began in 1888. Bucking convention, in 1891-1892, 1893-1894, 1897, 1900-1901, and 1902, she avidly accompanied (or sought to rendezvous with) her husband’s party on expeditions to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and made underacknowledged contributions to this work both while in the Arctic and while at home in the United States.

Learning from, and working uneasily alongside, myriad Inuit women whose labor, skill, technology, and expertise enabled the crew’s survival, and sharing her labors with nannies and maids hired for the journeys, Josephine supported the expeditions in domestic ways that were expected of white women in imperial contexts. Beyond reproducing home-like spaces at the expeditions’ base camps, she sewed animal furs into clothing and sleeping bags and, in concert with Robert’s indispensable colleague, Matthew Henson, assumed authority over cleaning, food preparation, and other aspects of the camp’s domestic economy. In accordance with her position in the racial and familial hierarchy, her responsibilities also extended to managing food rationing in Robert’s absence and bartering with Inuit, not only for goods and labor but also for other items of ethnographic interest that Robert had been commissioned to collect. In these and in other ways, such as her clerical work recording anthropometric measurements of Inuit individuals, shooting narwhal to be collected as specimens of arctic fauna, and, later, selling collected meteorite fragments (which Inuit had relied on for tools) to raise funds, she participated in the extractive mission of the expeditions. With others in the party, she also tracked, hunted, and trapped game and reloaded the crew’s rifles to fend off a walrus attack, among other activities.

Through the Pearys’ experiences in the Arctic, their lives became deeply intertwined with the region and its people. Josephine was pregnant when she set off for her second expedition, giving birth above the Arctic Circle to her first child, Marie Ahnighito Peary, in September of 1893, with the assistance of her nurse, Susan Cross. Eqariusaq, a young teenage Inuk girl, accompanied Josephine, Marie, and Cross on their return home in 1894, serving the family for a year as a nanny for Marie before returning north (Eqariusaq’s feelings about this arrangement are unknown). In 1900, Josephine and Marie ventured north aboard the Windward in an ill-fated attempt to retrieve Robert but became frozen in at Payer Harbour, Umimmait Nunaat (Ellesmere Island), some 300 miles south of where Robert would remain for the winter. During that interval, Inuk teenager Aleqasina (who had an Inuk husband with whom she lived) boarded the ship with her baby son, Anaukaq, and informed Josephine that Robert was his father. Robert’s sexual relations with Aleqasina, typical of the power dynamics between white male explorers and female Inuit, were but one manifestation of his imperial claim to the Arctic. Aleqasina and Robert would have a second son by the name of Kaali in 1906. This Inuit family of Robert’s was left destitute after his final departure from the region in 1909, though Kaali’s descendants do live on today.

In a variety of unofficial ways that fell within her culturally sanctioned idiom, Josephine Peary contributed to the historical and scientific narrative of American incursion into the Arctic and argued for the Pearys’ legitimacy at the center of it. This she accomplished in part through her three books (and the journals on which they were based), My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos (1893), taken from her writing during the 1891-1892 expedition; The Snow Baby: A True Story with True Pictures (1901), her popular children’s book about Marie; and Children of the Arctic, by the Snow Baby and Her Mother (1903), recounting Arctic visits during Marie’s childhood through an ethnographic lens. Capitalizing on her celebrity, Josephine also kept the public’s attention on Robert’s work and raised funds to support it by delivering illustrated lectures and otherwise calling on her many well-placed connections. Within their parlor, she affirmed Robert’s asserted acquisition of the Arctic through assemblages of material culture artifacts collected during their travels; reciprocally, she inscribed the Arctic on domestic objects such as the Hudson Bay blanket she stitched with the coordinates of Marie’s birth. Josephine also sewed Robert a silk American flag (now at the National Geographic Society), pieces of which he left at Arctic cairns to mark his achievements, most notably his claim of the region on behalf of the United States upon reaching what he believed to be the North Pole. This private collecting and curation of Josephine’s were analogs to those practiced by public repositories and museums.

After Robert Peary’s final expedition in 1909, during which he had claimed to reach the Pole, the Pearys and their two surviving children, Marie and Robert Jr. (born in 1903), spent most of their time at their summer home on Eagle Island, off Harpswell, Maine in Casco Bay, where Josephine cultivated a garden and planted hundreds of trees; they continued to reside in Washington, DC during the winter months. Josephine remained active in many organizations, including the Philadelphia Geographic Society, the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Society of Woman Geographers, and the National Geographic Society, which awarded her the Medal of Achievement, their highest honor, in 1955. After Robert’s death in 1920, Josephine settled into a permanent home on Baxter Boulevard in Portland, Maine. She died on December 19, 1955, and is buried next to her husband in Arlington National Cemetery.

The MWWC is grateful to Navarana Sørensen for her consultation on this note.