Survivor Jane: An Interview With A ‘Girly Girl’ Prepper

The internet phenom known as Survivor Jane is ripping up prepper stereotypes and helping other women become more self-reliant in the process. During an interview with The Inquisitr, Survivor Jane shared how she went from being a “girly girl” who was clueless potential disasters, the economy, and politics, to an online prepping queen.

She created the extremely popular PrepperTalk hashtag on Twitter. Every day thousands of Jane’s fellow preppers use the hashtag to share resources, ask questions, and to gather information for various paper.li dailies.

Survivor Jane was just another professional woman going about her daily life in her nice neighborhood, until everything began to change one fateful day. The “straw that broke the camel’s back” is cliché, but accurately describes the stresser which prompted Jane’s transformation.

Jane already knew how to handle a gun, but was not adept at starting fires by rubbing two sticks together or familiar with the fine art of deer skinning. She embarked on a journey of self-education which led to the development of a legion of followers who wanted to learn how to protect their families and become more self-sufficient.

IQ -You began your prepping experience after growing concerned about crime and economic civil unrest. As your website indicates, you were robbed at gunpoint during an attempted car-jacking. How did that tragic experience impact your sense of safety?

Survivor Jane – By nature I am a trusting person. And in fact, I was doing what came natural to me at the time of this incident. I was letting two people who were running down the sidewalk, seemingly in a great hurry, cross in front of my car before pulling out of the parking garage. What I didn’t know was they had just robbed someone at gun point and were looking for a getaway vehicle. Mine. Doors locked, they began pounding on the front and back passenger door windows with theirs guns.

Luckily, a 911 call had been placed about the prior robbery and in minutes my vehicle was surrounded by law enforcement vehicles. That was really the last straw for me. I was already a prisoner in my own home with security alarms and motion detector lights due to the escalating crime in my neighborhood. I didn’t want to live in fear. I was trained in handgun use and would frequent the range for practice. But because my place of employment was in downtown, there was no escaping the threat of harm. With the burst of the housing bubble and the crash of the stock market, people were becoming desperate – even good people.

IQ – As a self-proclaimed “girly-girl” it would seem you would be in the minority in the prepper community. Is that an accurate assumption or are the rural “manly-man” prepper stereotypes off-base?

Survivor Jane – Preparedness or ‘prepping’ is quickly becoming mainstream. Yes, I think girly-girls are a minority, but that too is coming around. Think about it, the manly-man prepper has always hand the upper hand. Beginning with boy scouts at a young age and then learning to fish, hunt, use a rifle, and bow – all things manly. While girly-girls; well a lot of them anyhow, focused on all things girly.

IQ – How did you educate yourself on prepper techniques and habits?

Survivor Jane – My preparedness education came from books and from preparedness sites on the internet.

IQ – What prompted you to begin a prepping for women style website?

Survivor Jane – SurvivorJane.com was created out of my frustration at the preparedness sites on the internet. Most of them were geared to men who were way more advanced than I was as a beginner prepper. They often discussed topics I didn’t have a clue about, or were written by women who actually knew bread was made with flour.

I spent more of my time researching what a phrase, term, or word, meant on a site, than actually learning from the site. And then it dawned on me, there has got to be more people out there like me. People who had a desire to learn more about preparedness but were just too overwhelmed by the information on the internet. So, I took the ‘meat’ of the information that I researched and put it in short easy to understand preparedness topics.

IQ – Paracord bracelets are a popular seller with preppers, outdoorsmen, and survivalists. Your signature line of paracord bracelets and hair accessories differ significantly from the kind found at local Army/Navy surplus store and Walmart. How did the fashionable and potentially life-saving accessories come about?

Survivor Jane – Again, out of a frustration at the lack of ‘female-ish’ preparedness products, Simply Survival Jewelry & Accessories was created. Gun companies have attempted to bridge that gap by making pink weapons. It’s a start. But when it came to jewelry, yes even for preparedness sake, I just couldn’t bring myself to wear manly bracelets or accessories.

So I created items I would wear. And as I wore them, people would ask where I purchased the bracelet or hair accessory from. Again, I saw the need and added them to my site as just another of the many preparedness tools we could have on our person. These are one of a kind – not cookie cutter type pieces – so there are new items all the time.

IQ – What tips would you give to other women who are interested in prepping?

Survivor Jane – My whole victory cry to women, and men for that matter, is you don’t have to give up being ‘you’ to be prepared. It is more about being aware of what is happening around you, having your basic needs covered [food, water, shelter, warmth and protection], and in an emergency or disaster situation, knowing you have to be self-reliant as help may not be in the way.