Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters - irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women's travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women's journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book's scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary «road girls», and topics range from Anna Leonowens's slanted portrayal of Siam - later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist «descripting» of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calderón de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Néel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.

The years between 1870 and 1940 are often considered a 'golden age' of travel: as larger and evermore sumptuous ships and trains were built, including the Orient Express, Blue Train, Lusitania and Normandie, journeying abroad became, and remains today, synonymous with chic, splendour and luxury. Utilising women's diaries and letters, art, advertising, fiction and etiquette guides, Women, Travel and Identity considers the journey's impact upon understandings of female identity, definitions of femininity, modernity, glamour, class, travel, tourism, leisure and sexual opportunity during this period. It explores women's relationship with train and ship technology; cultural understandings of the journey; public expectations of women journeyers; how women journeyed in practice: their use of journey space, sociability with both Western and 'Other' non-Western journeyers, experience of love, sex and danger during the journey; and how women fashioned a journeyer identity which fused their existing domestic identities with new journey identities such as the journey chronicler. The journey is revealed to be an experience of sociability as much as mobility, dominated by ideas of respectability and reputation, class, power, vision and observation and home as well as the foreign and new.

7 Where her story begins: fashioning a journeyer identity -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Women journeyers -- Bibliography -- Index

The years between 1870 and 1940 are often considered a 'golden age' of travel: as larger and evermore sumptuous ships and trains were built, including the Orient Express, Blue Train, Lusitania and Normandie, journeying abroad became, and remains today, synonymous with chic, splendour and luxury. Utilising women's diaries and letters, art, advertising, fiction and etiquette guides, this book considers the journey's impact upon understandings of female identity, definitions of femininity, modernity, glamour, class, travel, tourism, leisure and sexual opportunity and threat during this period. It explores women's relationship with train and ship technology; cultural understandings of the journey; public expectations of women journeyers; how women journeyed in practice: their use of journey space, sociability with both Western and 'Other' non-Western journeyers, experience of love, sex and danger during the journey; and how women fashioned a journeyer identity which fused their existing domestic identities with new journey identities such as the journey chronicler. The journey is revealed to be an experience of sociability as much as mobility, dominated by ideas of respectability and reputation, class, power, vision and observation and home as well as the foreign and new.

In the Edo period (1600–1868), status- and gender-based expectations largely defined a person’s place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page of the diary offered a precious opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement. After the mid-eighteenth century—which saw the popularization of culture and the rise of commercial printing—textbooks, guides, comical fiction, and woodblock prints allowed not a few commoners to acquaint themselves with the historical, lyrical, or artistic pedigree of Japan’s famous sites. By identifying themselves with famous literary and historical icons of the past, some among these erudite commoners saw an opportunity to rewrite their lives and re-create their identities in the pages of their travel diaries. The chapters in Part One, “Re-creating Spaces,” introduce the notion that the spaces of travel were malleable, accommodating reconceptualization across interpretive frames. Laura Nenzi shows that, far from being static backgrounds, these travelscapes proliferated in a myriad of loci where one person’s center was another’s periphery. In Part Two, “Re-creating Identities,” we see how, in the course of the Edo period, educated persons used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites to assert and enhance their roles and identities. Finally, in Part Three, “Purchasing Re-creation,” Nenzi looks at the intersection between recreational travel and the rising commercial economy, which allowed visitors to appropriate landscapes through new means: monetary transactions, acquisition of tangible icons, or other forms of physical interaction.

Women and Travel: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives is a fascinating look at the behavior, motivations, experiences, and needs of women as tourists and travellers, drawing on both historic and contemporary eras. Surprisingly little research has explored key issues, experiences, and opportunities in the context of women’s travel. This revealing volume fills this gap, exploring the discourses, debates, and discussions about women, travel, and tourism. With an international roster of contributors from diverse regions of the world, the book celebrates a variety of women’s voices. Khoo-Lattimore and Wilson deliberately sought to include nontraditional and non-Western perspectives on women’s travel, with inclusions of Asian solo female travelers; Islamic women travellers and the constraints placed on them; and women who cannot travel (or choose, for whatever reason, a ‘home holiday’). This enlightening volume brings together scholars from the broad areas of tourism, hospitality, geography, and leisure studies to examine how and why women travel. The chapters bring light to perspectives from different countries, cultures, backgrounds, and religions, and utilize different methods, approaches and styles of presentation. Women and Travel: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives will be of interest to academics and graduate students from a range of disciplines, including tourism, leisure studies, sociology, cultural geography, anthropology, feminist and gender studies, business, economics and management; as well as professionals working in the tourism industry, particularly those with an interest in niche markets and segmentation.

The authors pen a woman's guide to maintaining a sense of self while moving overseas, whether to start a new life or to follow a spouse.