Women are the exclusive focus of the 38th volume of Geographers. For the first time in the serial’s history, the entire volume is devoted to important work of distinguished female geographers, amply demonstrating how these scholars’ professional lives enrich the discipline’s history. It also illustrates how reading and writing their biographies not only expands our understanding of geography’s past, but points to its more diverse future.

The collection includes biographies of Doreen Massey, winner of geography’s ‘Nobel prize’, the prix Vautrin-Lud, for her remarkable contribution to geography and neighbouring disciplines which discovered the importance of space through her work; Helen Wallis, geographer and historian of cartography who for many years had charge of the UK’s foremost collection of maps; Alice Saunier-Seite, who applied her geographical training and formidable energy to teaching and educational reform in France; Isabel Margarida Andre, who lived through a turbulent political period in her native Portugal and meticulously investigated its effect on women and political geography; and the many women who helped to create the UK’s first Geography department - the University of Oxford’s, School of Geography - including Fanny Herbertson, Nora MacMunn, Marjorie Sweeting, Mary Marshall, Barbara Kennedy and other women geographers who are memorialised in a group article.