Josephine Diebitsch Peary

Josephine Cecilia Peary (née Diebitsch; May 22, 1863 – December 19, 1955) was an American author and arctic explorer. She was the wife of Robert Peary, who claimed to be the first to have reached the geographic North Pole.

Early life

Josephine Cecilia Diebitsch was born on May 22, 1863 on a farm in Maryland. Her mother, Magdalena Augusta (Schmid) Diebitsch, was from Saxony. Her father, Hermann Henry Diebitsch, was a military officer from Prussia. During the American Civil War, the Diebitsch family farm was destroyed, which led the family to relocate to Washington, D.C. Hermann was a clerk at the Smithsonian Institution. She had a brother, Emil Diebitsch, who later became the mayor of Nutley, New Jersey, and a sister, Marie Diebitsch.

Josephine attended Spencerian Business College and graduated as the class valedictorian in 1880. She found herself qualified and on track for a copyist, clerk, and tallyist position at the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Department of the Interior. Josephine wrote My Arctic Journal (1893) during the Peary expedition to Greenland of 1891–1892.

Marriage and family

Josephine first met Robert Peary in 1885 while she was attending dancing school. They got engaged in 1886, at which time she resigned from the Smithsonian Institution. She married him on August 11, 1888. She often accompanied him on his northern travels, where she traveled farther north over the ice fields than any white woman had before. Her eagerness to explore the world prompted her to accompany her husband on the Peary expedition to Greenland of 1891–1892. She accompanied him on six of his Arctic expeditions and was considered a First Lady of the Arctic. While they were married, in 1909, Robert Peary claimed to be the first to have reached the geographic North Pole. At that time, Josephine stayed home on Eagle Island in Casco Bay, Maine, which Robert bought in 1877.