The Art of Listening: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women Travelers and Their Work

Gertrude Bell. The Arabian Diaries, 1913-1914. Rosemary O'Brien, ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. xvi + 258 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8156-0672-9 (hb).

M. French-Sheldon, 'Bebe Bwana'. Sultan to Sultan: Adventures among the Masai and Other Tribes of East Africa. Tracy Jean Boisseau, ed.. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. x + 275 pp; ill. ISBN 0-7190-5113-4 (hb); 0-7190-5114-2 (pb).

Isabel Hoving. In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women's Writing. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. xiv + 374 pp. ISBN 0-8047-2947-6 (hb); 0-8047-2948-4 (pb).

Patricia D. Netzley, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Women's Travel and Exploration. Westport, Conn.: Oryx, 2001. x + 259 pp; ill. ISBN 1-5735-6238-6 (hb).

Sidonie Smith. Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. xviii + 240 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8166-2874-2(hb); 0-8166-2875-0 (pb).

Mary Ashley Townsend. Here and There in Mexico. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. xviii + 332 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8173-1058-4 (hb).

Barbara Young Welke. Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution 1865-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xx + 405 pp; ill. ISBN 0-5216-4020-2 (hb); 0-5216-4966-8 (pb).

It was reading women's travel accounts that first turned me into a good listener. Before I encountered the authors and texts of such alluring titles as Roughing it in the Bush ¹, or Unprotected Females in Sicily ², I assumed, as did many of their peers, that history's women travelers were merely eccentrics. Highly admirable eccentrics, perhaps, with a few pioneers crossing boundaries not only of landscape but also of cultural and gender limitation too, but eccentrics none the less. And even though they were demonstrably different from their normal, domesticated sisters, I reckoned they were not much different from each other. A woman traveler appeared a (fascinating) creature apart, whose voice was easily recognizable in her writing. That voice would be ingenuous, perhaps even apologetic; it would use mild humor to engage, mild sensationalism to entertain, and rely on the inherent perceived improbability of an independent woman traveling at all (and then writing about it) to make its literary mark.

After a few years' reading, however, and several more or less alarming armchair voyages around the world in their company, the hundreds of spirited and articulate characters whose travel accounts I studied taught me better. They spoke, in their documentation of familiar practicalities in an unfamiliar world, of the sustained and individual exigencies of travel. Of the personal hows and whys of travel rather than the more professional and imperative male preserves of what and where. In widely divergent styles they tended to discuss impression rather than commission, challenge rather than accomplishment, and the journey rather than its goal. They directed my response to them by presenting themselves in a variety of realities and guises (explorer, missionary, migrant, tourist, and so on) so that I came to realize that just as there is no such thing as the "typical" woman traveler—even during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—nor is there any recognizable genre of women's travel writing.

Ever since this discovery it has been my intention as a writer and anthologist to give women travelers back the voice that has become so stifled by the prejudice of contemporary and even modern critics. When a small number of well-qualified British women was controversially elected to Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892 (among them Isabella Bird Bishop, the most familiar British woman travel-writer of all), the London periodical Punch felt moved to print the following little ditty:

A Lady an explorer? A traveller in skirts?
The notion's just a trifle too seraphic:
Let them...