Arts & Sciences Magazine

 By Steve Holt

Travel writing is a growing interest among BU students and faculty, and a handful of scholars have recently turned their attention to a group of travelers who’ve too often been overlooked: women.  

While popular history is replete with the names of male explorers and travelers like Marco Polo, Charles Darwin, and Jack Kerouac, two books, edited by faculty from CAS—Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing (Ilex Series, Harvard Univ. Press, 2022), edited by James Uden, professor and chair of classical studies; and Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana Univ. Press, 2022), coedited by Sunil Sharma, professor of Persianate and comparative literature—seek to bring women’s voices to the fore. Voices like that of 22-year-old Rose de Freycinet, who disguised herself as a man so she could join her husband, a lieutenant in the French Navy, on an 1817 circumnavigation of the globe. (Women were strictly forbidden from such travel.) In a journal and letters written home to her mother over the three-year scientific expedition—some of which were published in French in 1927—de Freycinet describes her sometimes harrowing experience at sea in great detail, including being shipwrecked in the Falkland Islands.

“The more I read what she was writing, the more I realized how differently she was describing the experience compared to the men who were on board the ship who wrote their own reports,” says Elizabeth Goldsmith, professor emerita of French, whose chapter on de Freycinet appears in Worlds of Knowledge. “She really had her own perspective on everything from the shipwreck, to observing costumes, to writing about the weather in the different places where they landed, to looking at the flowers, and talking about animals and what the crewmembers ate and how they got sick. She just put in details that were quite different from what the men did.”

Besides Goldsmith’s essay on the French stowaway, eight other scholars contributed chapters to Uden’s Worlds of Knowledge. The essays cover narratives of travels to Iraq, Spain, and Japan. Sharma wrote a chapter on British women traveling in India and Iran in the 19th century, and Uden’s chapter probes Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for insights about the fascination with travel to Gothic abbeys in the 1790s.

“Travel writing, like novel writing in the 18th and 19th centuries, was a form that was open to women in a way that political philosophy or other forms of writing weren’t,” Uden says. “You could see women expressing themselves in travel writing.”

Elevating Muslim Women Travel Writers

Being Muslim would have complicated travel even further for women, as most would have been required to travel with a male relative. Sharma’s 532-page anthology explores firsthand narratives of 45 Muslim women who traveled between the 17th and 20th centuries. The idea came from his students in Travel Writing and the Muslim world, where many of the texts were written by Muslim men or Western women traveling in the Middle East. “One of the complaints we always got was, ‘we want to hear more women’s voices,’” says Sharma. That’s how the book, which he coedited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, and Daniel Majchrowicz of Northwestern University, began.

Scholars translated the travel narratives into English from several languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Urdu, and Malay. Much of the previously translated travel writing by Muslim women were pilgrimage narratives, so Sharma saw this project as a chance to elevate the experiences of Muslim women in other parts of the world, such as to universities in Europe or the US in the 19th or 20th centuries. One of the narratives included in Three Centuries is that of Sediqeh Dowlatabadi, whose travels in France while enrolled in a college there helped fuel her advocacy for women’s rights back in her native Iran. But while Muslim women certainly learned from the West, they did not view them as utopias, Sharma says. “​​Whereas men would focus on technology and progress and say, ‘How can we catch up with the West?’ the women were thinking, ‘well, we don’t want to catch up with everything. We want to take what’s good and leave behind what’s not.’” 

A Different Lens on the World

It’s not a coincidence that BU scholars have edited multiple books on the same topic. Sharma, Uden, and Goldsmith meet regularly with other BU faculty as part of an informal travel studies research group. For about the last decade, the group has read primary texts of travel narratives and come together once a month to discuss them. Ideas for several books, including Uden’s Worlds of Knowledge and the upcoming Mobility and Masks: Cultural Identity in Travel Literature (Ilex Series, Harvard Univ. Press, 2024), which Goldsmith edited, have emerged from travel research group discussions. Mobility and Masks will explore the ways in which travelers disguise or mask themselves and includes several chapters about women: from Princess Sophia of Hanover traveling “incognito” to avoid the pomp of her position to Creole women donning white masks to appear more “British.” 

Uden points out that while it’s impossible to make generalizations about the way women travelers viewed the world, women did tend to bring a curiosity and sense of wonder to their travel narratives that were less common in the journals and logs written by men. Because of the cultural taboos around women traveling alone, they were especially susceptible to violence, mainly at the hands of men. (Dressing up like a man, therefore, would offer some protection.) And where men also faced dangers of all kinds in their travels, women often wrote about them in a more honest and forthright way—while refusing to portray themselves as victims. “Many of these women [travelers] were students, and my international students loved those readings,” Sharma says. “The fears, the anxieties that, 100 years ago, some of these women were feeling are the same things that [students] might feel today, and they’re being very honest about their emotions.”

Sharma says he knows of several university faculty around the world that used his anthology of travel writing by Muslim women in their courses and he’s used it in his own classes. “The students just loved it,” he says. “They responded so well in the discussions, in the papers, in the creative projects. I think it opened up a whole new world for them.”