Many years ago in India I met an Englishwoman who had sold all her possessions when her husband died and took to the road with no intention of ever stopping until forced to. She had been married to a man who hated travel, so they had gone to the same caravan for summer holidays all their lives. She told me ‘dying was the best thing he ever did for me.’
This is a pretty terrible epitaph for a lifetime together and begs the question why she didn’t just head off on her own, at least once? Was she so controlled by him or afraid she would never come back?
At the other extreme was Amelia B. Edwards, the first female Egyptologist and one of the greatest promoter of Egyptology. Her travels began when she was in the Dolomites with a female friend. They saw the region’s highest mountain, asked if it had been climbed, and when they found out it had not, they did it.
Just because.
I have just invested a whopping £2.99 in a copy of the Faber Book of Exploration edited by Benedict Allen, about 800 pages of tiny print so now I can add reading this to staring at my laptop as a source of impending blindness. He has more female travel accounts than similar tomes.
Here is a quote from Elta Close:
“Looking with a disinterested spinster eye on the world, I notice that even when women have the health and the money to be free, they seem to like the feeling of being anchored… for those who do not marry a man seem inevitably to marry themselves to a garden, or a house, or a dog, and then having forged their own chains say pathetically, “If only I were free, how I would love to travel and see the world.” In the year of our Lord 1922 I was free, and I realized it….”
And this is from Abigail Adams, wife of the second US president, John :
“Women … are considered as Domestick Beings, and altho they inherit an Equal Share of curiosity with the other Sex.. the Natural tenderness and Delicacy of our Constitutions, added to the many dangers we are subject to from your Sex, renders it almost impossible for a single lady to travel without injury to her character.”
Despite the odds against the so-called weaker sex, there have been an impressive number who have travelled and written and published their accounts. Lady Wortley Montague brought back from Turkey the secret of immunisation against smallpox, though it was the practice of pricking the skin of a healthy person with some live fluid or pus from a sick person, so giving a low dose of a real illness, with all the risk that involved.
There were also women who pretended to be men and joined the army and navy, there was even at least one female pirate. There are even rumours there was once a female pope who was only exposed when she got pregnant. Hmmmmm
texthistory 