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In the lines quoted above, Harper Pitt, the Valium-addicted housewife in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, hallucinates a visit to Ant-arctica, which she imagines as a pastoral idyll, a space of escape from her everyday life (1993, 101–2). Until the late twentieth century, most people—and, particularly, most women—could only ever visit Antarctica as Harper does: in their imaginations. Regular opportunities for women to travel to Antarctica as workers or tourists opened up only in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Prior to this, women’s relationships with Antarctica were either nonexistent or, as in Harper’s case, speculative, built on a mélange of prior assumptions and representations. For this reason, any attempt to bring a gender studies perspective to bear on actual polar histories must take into account the imaginative histories that run alongside them.