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No Place for a Lady
Travellers, by nature peripatetic and ephemeral, are easily forgotten; women travellers, in a world where women's stories are under-recorded, are doubly lost. For the Vancouver Museum exhibit about women travellers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of them British and American, Barbara Hodgson invited local, contemporary women to send in their expired passports. These are displayed on a wall, most of them open at the passport holder's photograph. In her gorgeous books No Place for a Lady: Tales of Adventurous Women Travellers (2002), and the recently published, Dreaming of East: Western Women and the Exotic Allure of the Orient, Hodgson in essence proves, through a wealth of photographs and first-person accounts, that hundreds of women travelled widely and independently in an era when they also clamped their bodies into corsets and were not permitted to vote.
While Dreaming of East is primarily documentary, Hodgson considers the curious liberation western women experienced in the Middle East. Many women wrote, sketched, and studied there, and a few engaged in politics. There was an enormous audience for their experiences: Hodgson has read 800 books by women who travelled to the Middle East before the early 1900s.
In person, Hodgson, book designer and author of four novels and an acclaimed non-fiction book about opium, as well as her books about travellers, is both open and intent. She laughs easily and speaks fondly about the women whose lives she has uncovered, enjoying their foibles and their exploits.
SARA CASSIDY: Why are you fascinated by intrepid women?
BARBARA HODGSON: I had read through all the men's travel books and I always thought to myself, there's more to it. Every so often. I would stumble across a woman's travel book, like something by Isabella Bird (1831 - 1904), a very popular writer, and it seemed to me that there was something extra. I realised while I was reading, that although I would be aghast and appalled at some of the conditions the men got themselves into, it said so much more when women described it. I'd think, "Well, a guy can go and do that kind of thing, a guy can go and stay in a inn with a hundred other men he doesn't know."; But then you read Isabella Bird going into an inn in Iraq where there are a hundred men and she's the only woman. And you think, how did she do that?
The more I read, I realised there was a huge variation of women. There were women who got dragged along, you know, by their husbands or their brothers or they didn't want to be left alone so they came. Then there were those who just set out on their own. Isabella Bird: she didn't start travelling until she was 40, she had terrible health - an injured back, heart problems - yet when she went travelling, she'd get on donkeys and horses and ride for days and days and say, actually, I don't feel so bad.
S: There's a chapter in No Place for a Lady about the Middle East. Why did return to the subject, and give it an entire book?
BH: I didn't feel I had done it justice. The moment where I really decided I had to do it was when I gave a lecture to a garden club in Vancouver and a woman came up to me after and said, "Well, have you ever been there?"; And I said, "But the book (No Place for a Lady) is about the whole world - where are you talking about?"; And she said, "Oh, come on, you know what I mean - the Middle East!"; And I thought, you know, there are other people who are interested in that area. And there is a thesis you can develop about the Middle East that you can't develop about other places. Other places, people end up there more by accident. And Europe, everyone travelled to Europe. (And in talking about that,) we can say, "We've misunderstood how much women were able to get out at that time. They did travel and they travelled consciously and let's not forget about it."; But there was actually a kind of rationale to travel in the Middle East, special reasons for doing it, and consequences for doing it. Also, nowhere else had that sense of liberation - that ironic sense of liberation that the Middle East has.
S: You propose various reasons women travelled - a desire for escape, simple wanderlust, getting out from under the dark skies of industrialisation, health -
BH: Health was a very big reason. Largely, I think the reason women just wanted to travel but they had to have an excuse. It wasn't good enough to just say, I feel like travelling. The Austrian Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858), who went to the Holy Land in 1848, she was over 40 years old when she left. She separated from her husband and she said, my sons are all grown up, I've always wanted to travel, if I don't do it now, I won't. So she saved up a little money, and took off by herself. She didn't pull any punches. But other people would say, I want to go to the Holy Land for a pilgrimage. Because it was socially acceptable to travel if you had a reason to travel.
S: You write that romanticisation, of the Middle East, however much it might have distorted the truth of the place, was an important invitation.
BH: The history was loaded - whether it was ancient or recent history: you have the pharoahs of Egypt, you have the Islamic history, the mosques. You had the appearance of The Thousand and One Nights, translated for the first time into French, in the early 1700s. You have authors like Montague and Racine who used as characters these exotic strangers who would come to Europe and criticise it - this was the way the authors were able to express their sense of corruption in Europe - you have social criticism from a foreigner dressed with the exoticism of this foreign place: they had multiple wives, they seemed to live in sin, they did everything that Europeans didn't like yet they had this idea that Europe was very corrupt. Then you have Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762) going to Constantinople and saying "We've all heard about harems, but we've only heard it from men, and since men aren't allowed into harems, we've heard nothing but lies. Finally, here's the truth";. So everyone galvanised this idea of the mysterious east, so near and so far, the lofty minarets, the saracen guards, the langurous harem, and it became a kind of el dorado for people and it was close enough for Europeans to actually consider going there. But it was also a wonderful place to go because it was so remote from their experience.
S: You raise this tension that it had this allure of freedom for women. Which seems ironic.
BH: You have Isabel Brooke saying "the desert is freedom";. Why? Because she could sit on a horse and gallop? That doesn't seem quite right. No, it was their ability to see how their lives were compared to the lives in the Middle East. And they had a rapport with the men in the Middle East. that middle eastern women seemed not to have. And it was also a rapport they didn't have with their own men. They were treated like honorary men, which at the time was a great elevation in status. Right now, you'd say, that doesn't sound like such a great thing, but at that time, it meant that people took you seriously.
S: You mention western women offered a kind of third gender.
BH: Yes, a sexless kind of gender, because although there were exceptions, Middle Eastern men had never seen such a creature before as a European woman. She was physically a woman, but she strutted about without her face covered, she demanded things, she had levels of education, she could give opinions. You have Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso (1808-71) who says, I've talked with the mafti about world affairs. And he obviously took her seriously. No western man would have asked her for her opinions.
S: Many were drawn by the romanticisation - how did they deal with the truth of it?
BH: Well, you have Cristina di Belgiojoso talking about the cobwebs, the cracked mirrors, the women plastering themselves with lots and lots of makeup and looking into their tarnished mirrors and she calls them hags. Yet her writing is full of romance. At practically every step, no matter how realistic she is, you say I wish I was on that trip with her.
S: So the romance endured -
BH: Isabel Burton (1831-96) wrote very realistically about many of the troubles - she went to many of the harems, and she thought when women took off their veils, it was a pretty shocking thing. A lot of them were bald or had dyed their hair so often it was falling out. Still, when she got home, she wrote I pine for Damascus. I must go back, I will go back.
S: Most of these women did not consider themselves feminist?
BH: No, they were individualists. They felt that women didn't need to have a general helping hand, that everybody succeeded on their own regardless. And they were doing fine. As long as they were doing fine, what was the problem Why would they need all of these rights enshrined, because we know how to get them. And it's almost kind of true - they had really brilliant lives if they were strong enough.
S: And they weren't all wealthy -
BH: No, but they could establish a niche for themselves, establish themselves as writers or social activists in some ways. Plus a lot of them thought it would take away from their ability to do what they wanted, if they had to have the responsibilities of men, if they had to earn the money for the household, if they had to run as Member of Parliament, if they had to have jobs and go into the city every day. It was a case of - they wanted their cake and eat it too.
S: Was it easier for women to be scholars and writers in the middle east?
BH: They could do what they wanted. They could go out and collect their specimens, they could paint, they could write. They would attract attention of course, as a foreigner and as a woman. But there was nobody telling them they couldn't do it.
S: Those strictures were gone. You write that what these women did influenced women back home.
BH: It was a really terrific influence from the point of view of yes, I can go and do that too. The stories they wrote about what they did were coming out fast and furious: you had someone like Harriet Martineau (1802 - 76) going to Egypt in 1843 and her book was published two years later. You have Isabella Bird who went to Persia in 1891 and her book was published in 1892. And these are huge two volume things. I suspect I've got 800 books listed by women who were travel writers.
S: What was one of your more exciting research moments?
BH: Largely, finding original materials. But little things: I just bought a rock collection (at a Vancouver auction house) that was put together in 1836 and each of the pieces of rock was wrapped in a piece of newspaper, some from the Times. the first I opened up I read, Born to Emeline Stewart Wartley,: a son. And that was one of my travellers. And I hadn't known she had had a son.
S: You mentioned the consequences of travel in the Middle East. What did you mean?
BH: That sense of dissatisfaction with life after travelling, going back to the rigors of society and its constraints. Cristina di Belgiojoso said, "I can't believe that this kind of life is good for young women, it makes them totally unfit for regular life."; And it did. But that meant that they would push the limits of their lives when they got back home.
S: Why is it important that we know about these women?
BH: Because too much of women's history has been lost. Because people have not thought their lives are important. And just as it's important to know about women painters and scientists, it's important to know about travellers because they have influenced our lives.
S: Thank you.
BH: Thank you!
Vancouver Museum's exhibit, No Place for a Lady ran November 11, 2005 - October 1, 2006.
While Dreaming of East is primarily documentary, Hodgson considers the curious liberation western women experienced in the Middle East. Many women wrote, sketched, and studied there, and a few engaged in politics. There was an enormous audience for their experiences: Hodgson has read 800 books by women who travelled to the Middle East before the early 1900s.
In person, Hodgson, book designer and author of four novels and an acclaimed non-fiction book about opium, as well as her books about travellers, is both open and intent. She laughs easily and speaks fondly about the women whose lives she has uncovered, enjoying their foibles and their exploits.
SARA CASSIDY: Why are you fascinated by intrepid women?
BARBARA HODGSON: I had read through all the men's travel books and I always thought to myself, there's more to it. Every so often. I would stumble across a woman's travel book, like something by Isabella Bird (1831 - 1904), a very popular writer, and it seemed to me that there was something extra. I realised while I was reading, that although I would be aghast and appalled at some of the conditions the men got themselves into, it said so much more when women described it. I'd think, "Well, a guy can go and do that kind of thing, a guy can go and stay in a inn with a hundred other men he doesn't know."; But then you read Isabella Bird going into an inn in Iraq where there are a hundred men and she's the only woman. And you think, how did she do that?
The more I read, I realised there was a huge variation of women. There were women who got dragged along, you know, by their husbands or their brothers or they didn't want to be left alone so they came. Then there were those who just set out on their own. Isabella Bird: she didn't start travelling until she was 40, she had terrible health - an injured back, heart problems - yet when she went travelling, she'd get on donkeys and horses and ride for days and days and say, actually, I don't feel so bad.
S: There's a chapter in No Place for a Lady about the Middle East. Why did return to the subject, and give it an entire book?
BH: I didn't feel I had done it justice. The moment where I really decided I had to do it was when I gave a lecture to a garden club in Vancouver and a woman came up to me after and said, "Well, have you ever been there?"; And I said, "But the book (No Place for a Lady) is about the whole world - where are you talking about?"; And she said, "Oh, come on, you know what I mean - the Middle East!"; And I thought, you know, there are other people who are interested in that area. And there is a thesis you can develop about the Middle East that you can't develop about other places. Other places, people end up there more by accident. And Europe, everyone travelled to Europe. (And in talking about that,) we can say, "We've misunderstood how much women were able to get out at that time. They did travel and they travelled consciously and let's not forget about it."; But there was actually a kind of rationale to travel in the Middle East, special reasons for doing it, and consequences for doing it. Also, nowhere else had that sense of liberation - that ironic sense of liberation that the Middle East has.
S: You propose various reasons women travelled - a desire for escape, simple wanderlust, getting out from under the dark skies of industrialisation, health -
BH: Health was a very big reason. Largely, I think the reason women just wanted to travel but they had to have an excuse. It wasn't good enough to just say, I feel like travelling. The Austrian Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858), who went to the Holy Land in 1848, she was over 40 years old when she left. She separated from her husband and she said, my sons are all grown up, I've always wanted to travel, if I don't do it now, I won't. So she saved up a little money, and took off by herself. She didn't pull any punches. But other people would say, I want to go to the Holy Land for a pilgrimage. Because it was socially acceptable to travel if you had a reason to travel.
S: You write that romanticisation, of the Middle East, however much it might have distorted the truth of the place, was an important invitation.
BH: The history was loaded - whether it was ancient or recent history: you have the pharoahs of Egypt, you have the Islamic history, the mosques. You had the appearance of The Thousand and One Nights, translated for the first time into French, in the early 1700s. You have authors like Montague and Racine who used as characters these exotic strangers who would come to Europe and criticise it - this was the way the authors were able to express their sense of corruption in Europe - you have social criticism from a foreigner dressed with the exoticism of this foreign place: they had multiple wives, they seemed to live in sin, they did everything that Europeans didn't like yet they had this idea that Europe was very corrupt. Then you have Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762) going to Constantinople and saying "We've all heard about harems, but we've only heard it from men, and since men aren't allowed into harems, we've heard nothing but lies. Finally, here's the truth";. So everyone galvanised this idea of the mysterious east, so near and so far, the lofty minarets, the saracen guards, the langurous harem, and it became a kind of el dorado for people and it was close enough for Europeans to actually consider going there. But it was also a wonderful place to go because it was so remote from their experience.
S: You raise this tension that it had this allure of freedom for women. Which seems ironic.
BH: You have Isabel Brooke saying "the desert is freedom";. Why? Because she could sit on a horse and gallop? That doesn't seem quite right. No, it was their ability to see how their lives were compared to the lives in the Middle East. And they had a rapport with the men in the Middle East. that middle eastern women seemed not to have. And it was also a rapport they didn't have with their own men. They were treated like honorary men, which at the time was a great elevation in status. Right now, you'd say, that doesn't sound like such a great thing, but at that time, it meant that people took you seriously.
S: You mention western women offered a kind of third gender.
BH: Yes, a sexless kind of gender, because although there were exceptions, Middle Eastern men had never seen such a creature before as a European woman. She was physically a woman, but she strutted about without her face covered, she demanded things, she had levels of education, she could give opinions. You have Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso (1808-71) who says, I've talked with the mafti about world affairs. And he obviously took her seriously. No western man would have asked her for her opinions.
S: Many were drawn by the romanticisation - how did they deal with the truth of it?
BH: Well, you have Cristina di Belgiojoso talking about the cobwebs, the cracked mirrors, the women plastering themselves with lots and lots of makeup and looking into their tarnished mirrors and she calls them hags. Yet her writing is full of romance. At practically every step, no matter how realistic she is, you say I wish I was on that trip with her.
S: So the romance endured -
BH: Isabel Burton (1831-96) wrote very realistically about many of the troubles - she went to many of the harems, and she thought when women took off their veils, it was a pretty shocking thing. A lot of them were bald or had dyed their hair so often it was falling out. Still, when she got home, she wrote I pine for Damascus. I must go back, I will go back.
S: Most of these women did not consider themselves feminist?
BH: No, they were individualists. They felt that women didn't need to have a general helping hand, that everybody succeeded on their own regardless. And they were doing fine. As long as they were doing fine, what was the problem Why would they need all of these rights enshrined, because we know how to get them. And it's almost kind of true - they had really brilliant lives if they were strong enough.
S: And they weren't all wealthy -
BH: No, but they could establish a niche for themselves, establish themselves as writers or social activists in some ways. Plus a lot of them thought it would take away from their ability to do what they wanted, if they had to have the responsibilities of men, if they had to earn the money for the household, if they had to run as Member of Parliament, if they had to have jobs and go into the city every day. It was a case of - they wanted their cake and eat it too.
S: Was it easier for women to be scholars and writers in the middle east?
BH: They could do what they wanted. They could go out and collect their specimens, they could paint, they could write. They would attract attention of course, as a foreigner and as a woman. But there was nobody telling them they couldn't do it.
S: Those strictures were gone. You write that what these women did influenced women back home.
BH: It was a really terrific influence from the point of view of yes, I can go and do that too. The stories they wrote about what they did were coming out fast and furious: you had someone like Harriet Martineau (1802 - 76) going to Egypt in 1843 and her book was published two years later. You have Isabella Bird who went to Persia in 1891 and her book was published in 1892. And these are huge two volume things. I suspect I've got 800 books listed by women who were travel writers.
S: What was one of your more exciting research moments?
BH: Largely, finding original materials. But little things: I just bought a rock collection (at a Vancouver auction house) that was put together in 1836 and each of the pieces of rock was wrapped in a piece of newspaper, some from the Times. the first I opened up I read, Born to Emeline Stewart Wartley,: a son. And that was one of my travellers. And I hadn't known she had had a son.
S: You mentioned the consequences of travel in the Middle East. What did you mean?
BH: That sense of dissatisfaction with life after travelling, going back to the rigors of society and its constraints. Cristina di Belgiojoso said, "I can't believe that this kind of life is good for young women, it makes them totally unfit for regular life."; And it did. But that meant that they would push the limits of their lives when they got back home.
S: Why is it important that we know about these women?
BH: Because too much of women's history has been lost. Because people have not thought their lives are important. And just as it's important to know about women painters and scientists, it's important to know about travellers because they have influenced our lives.
S: Thank you.
BH: Thank you!
Vancouver Museum's exhibit, No Place for a Lady ran November 11, 2005 - October 1, 2006.
Submitted on December 11, 2008 in By David.
