Is Focusing on Women Counter-Productive?

The gender playing field tilted even more steeply in the past. And yet, when it came to travel and exploration, women overcame the same hazardous terrain as men with equal courage, determination and skill.

My only regret when researching for Passionate Travellers: Around the World on 21 Incredible Journeys in History, was that I could not find more of them to fit my framework.

When I sent Passionate Travellers to beta-readers, one of the male respondents was so impressed by the women’s achievements that he said I should have written solely about women rather than the eight women and thirteen men that make up my travellers.

There is always one who suggests you should have written a different book! But his point was important, so I explained to him my ground plan for Passionate Travellers.

Selecting the tales was the most difficult part; there were so many courageous people who had amazing encounters in superb and threatening landscapes. My purpose was to create a collection of true travel experiences – complete journeys for the reader to follow step by step – with people of diverse origins, social backgrounds and personal quests heading for destinations that would give a worldwide coverage. And the book spans over 2,000 years of history, so I needed to select travellers’ stories spread as evenly as possible along that time thread. I was fascinated by the idea of ‘journey’: what it meant, how it had changed.

Unsurprisingly, the main problem in finding women travellers was a lack of documentation, especially earlier than the nineteenth century when more women began to write their own travelogues. Tantalising mentions of women who had travelled centuries earlier on pilgrimages, on business, or to pursue some personal desire lacked sufficient detail to reconstruct their journeys: the age-old problem of ‘invisible’ women.

Although a few of my ‘passionate travellers’ are well known, I wanted to select mostly ordinary people rather than the more visible ‘conquering heroes’ or social elites. If they had to struggle to even begin their journey, to me, that was more inspiring.

Women often did struggle harder than their male counterparts, both financially and against social expectations. Ida Pfeiffer, one of the few early travellers to Iceland, was forty-five years old before she was free of domestic duties and could raise funds for her trip; Isabella Bird reached her forty-eighth year before she could make her first major solo expedition – to Japan. But women dedicated to their purpose always found a way, as another of my ‘passionate travellers’, American journalist, Harriet Chalmers Adams, wrote in 1910: “If a woman be fond of travel, if she has love of the strange, the mysterious and the lost, there is nothing that will keep her at home.”

Explaining all of this to my male beta-reader set me thinking about the whole question of setting women apart; of writing gendered accounts. One difficulty is that readers who are ‘not interested in women’ would avoid such a book and miss out on beneficial treatment for their misogyny.

A more slippery issue is finding the balance between ensuring women’s triumphs are not overlooked, and the danger of those triumphs being measured against a lower bar: as a great achievement ‘for a woman’. The question for me was: had I achieved that balance?

In Passionate Travellers, the circumstances and motivations of male and female travellers are equally diverse, as are the challenges that each had to face in pursuing their quests. And the chapter heading for each traveller is, in most cases, un-gendered: ‘The Artist’, ‘The Anarchist’, ‘The Friend’, ‘The Storyteller’, and so on.  I hoped this approach would show the strengths and weaknesses of individuals without needing to ‘gender’ the narrative, and to test this, I sent the text for comments to a feminist activist and essayist, Rashmii Amoah Bell (@amoahfive_oh). With her permission, this is her response:

“I really liked your means of identification, i.e. ‘The Journalist’. That, combined with the traveller’s name, shifted my focus to the traveller’s purpose/objective of undertaking the journey, rather than thinking of them solely on their gender … e.g. assigning Isabella [Bird] the title, ‘The Invalid’, made my deep admiration for her becoming the first woman to be honoured with membership of the Royal Geographical Society, not because she was a woman, but because she was so determined. Determination and perseverance is the overall feeling and the words that came to my mind as I read each traveller’s account, and they are not confined to one gender.”

Encouraged by this feedback, I decided to change nothing in the narrative. A decision supported also in the voice of one of my ‘passionate travellers’: in 1899, Octavie Coudreau and her husband, Henri, were in a canoe surveying a remote tributary of the Amazon River, when he died of malaria. Octavie continued alone to chart Amazon river systems for a further seven years, employed by the Brazilian government as official ‘explorer’ – ‘explorateur’ in Octavie’s native French; a word that, she said, “was not appropriate to use in the feminine form [‘exploratrice’]”. Such were the demands of exploration that it could not be gendered – the danger, and the skills required, were the same for a woman as for a man.

Obviously there is a need to draw attention to women’s achievements overlooked by centuries of patriarchal neglect. Current research is now giving long overdue credit to women all over the world for their contributions to science, technology, art, literature and governance; an eye-opener to many and, clearly, a challenge to some.

All of this I applaud. But I also wonder if, when we focus solely on women, we are missing those instances when women’s achievements are not only equal to, but surpass those of male counterparts when measured against the same bar. 

—

Trish Nicholson is a social anthropologist, storyteller, author of narrative non-fiction, and a former columnist and features writer. Her fascination with people and places has led her to work and travel in every region of the world. Trish now lives in New Zealand, tending the native woodland she raised and planted. You can read more of her work on her website: www.trishnicholsonswordsinthetreehouse.com (where there really is a tree-house) and follow her on Twitter @TrishaNicholson

—
Passionate Travellers: Around the World on 21 Incredible Journeys in History

Accompanying these 21 passionate travellers on their personal quests, we discover what drove them, and share their incredible journeys through deserts, mountains, jungles and seas to every continent, spanning 2,000 years of history from 480 BCE to the 1930s. These are true stories of daring adventure, courage, cunning, even murder and, above everything, sheer determination against all odds.

Most of these eight women and thirteen men were ordinary people transformed by their journeys. They travelled from Africa, China, Persia, Russia, and the Mediterranean as well as from Europe and America. Their backgrounds were diverse, including: poet, artist, invalid, slave, pilgrim, doctor, missionary, scholar, diplomat, dilettante, storyteller, and anarchistic opera singer.

Not all survived. Many have been forgotten. Who now knows that Octavie Coudreau, stranded in a canoe on the Amazon in 1899 with her dead husband, continued to chart the river? That Thomas Stevens was the first person to cycle around the world on a penny-farthing? And why was an English parlour maid abandoned on the Trans-Siberian railway and arrested by Stalin’s secret police? With painstaking research and powerful storytelling, the author, herself a world-traveller, has created an intimate experience of each traveller’s journey and recaptured a vanished world. A compelling travel read and a treat for history lovers.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips