‘Antarctic Pioneer: The Trailblazing Life of Jackie Ronne’
By Joanna Kafarowski
Dundurn Press, 304 pages

On March 12, 1947, Jackie Ronne became the first American woman to reach Antarctica. The full story of how the 27-year-old got there has finally been told in this authoritative biography.

When Jackie married a Polar explorer named Finn Ronne, who was nearly 20 years older than her, she was working in the U.S. State Department and had no experience in exploration. On short notice, her husband asked her to accompany him. Unlike the men on the expedition, she had little time to prepare for this exciting ordeal and was not even certain she should do it. 

Finn, a commanding man who was deeply in love with Jackie, belatedly realized he could not undertake such a hazardous journey without her. He never explained why, and the men accompanying him objected to her presence — even threatening to quit the mission if she came along. Ms. Kafarowski’s narrative reveals why Jackie became indispensable, and why those men grudgingly accepted her.

Finn was good with maps, and he was good at public speaking and raising funds for his adventures, but he was not good with crew members: They resented his dictatorial, rigid, chain-of-command style, and his unwillingness to compromise. Jackie was a consummate diplomat with an organizing capacity that earned the respect of men even as they chafed at her presence. 

Finn showed his confidence in her by publicly declaring that should he die or become incapacitated on the polar adventure, she would replace him as leader. This angered his men, as they thought one of them should have been designated Finn’s successor. It got worse because one of Finn’s rivals, Harry Darlington, seemed to challenge him every agonizing step of the way.

How the Ronnes triumphed over all this dissension, how they prevailed over other disasters that seem almost inevitable in the forbidding polar environs, makes for riveting reading. This is especially true because Ms. Kafarowski has new primary source material, including interviews with two surviving crew members and the Ronnes’ only child, a daughter who remained close to her caring mother.

Before all of this, Jackie Ronne grew up with the encouragement of relatives who gave her the attention she could not count on from her wayward mother and father. She became determined to marry and have a family quite different from that formed by her delinquent parents, and she succeeded. This is a rare story where the woman really does have it all, a homelife and adventure.

Yet this is not a fairy tale. Jackie did grow resentful years after the expedition, as her husband simply could not publicly acknowledge all she had done for him. Jackie wrote more than a hundred dispatches during the expedition under her husband’s name, and she drafted his memoirs. She was the Colonel House to his Woodrow Wilson, the behind-the-scenes operator who kept the enterprise functioning.

This biography is about more than doing justice to Jackie Ronne and to others such as Harry Darlington’s wife, who also made the voyage to Antarctica over her own husband’s objections. Ms. Kafarowski is showing how history gets truncated, with Jackie — at least at first — minimizing her role so that her husband could be perceived as the hero.  

The polar expedition’s significant scientific findings are not part of the human interest narrative, but they are cataloged in an appendix that enumerates the work in geology and geomorphology, seismology and geophysics, meteorology and astrophysics, ship engineering, aviation and aerial photography, human ecology, geography and exploration.

Biographies are sometimes faulted for not giving enough historical context to the lives of individuals. For that, see another appendix: “Women in Antarctica Timeline.”

Ms. Kafarowski is herself exploring a speciality: She wrote a book about the generation before Jackie Ronne, “The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame: A Life of Louise Arner Boyd” (2017).

It should also be noted that Jackie Ronne had a career after her husband died. She became renowned in the latter part of her life as an authority on polar exploration. If she is not so well known now, that should soon change.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn.”