Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870-1914

The accepted critical view that late nineteenth-century women travelers were poor carbon copies of male originals has been increasingly shown to be invalid. Late nineteenth-century women's travel literature adhered to a particular worldview as it presented a woman's viewpoint. Closely tied to the given reality of mainstream late Victorian culture, such literature nearly always reflected contemporary social concerns closely related to late nineteenth-century British imperialism. Nonetheless, this work argues that in mapping out a particular performance space for themselves, late nineteenth-century women's travel and travel literature revealed changes in the way society thought about women.