Women Travelers and the Scientific Project
Overview
The assignment on women travelers is based on a number of identified and digitized texts on women writers recently made available Electronic Text Research Center (ETRC) in Wilson Library. In particular, there is a category of materials that are being developed on women travelers, and a subset of that group on women who studied the natural or social sciences in relationship to those travels. Given the current scholarly interest in the importance of space and place, and the often very important effect of going beyond their ususal or assigned locations (social, political, economic, geographic) for women, it seems useful to examine these women’s writings and lives in some detail. The degree of unconventionality and reflection seem important to understand for women at the margins of what was often perceived to be the male domain of science. Amy Foster has been entering these texts on line and is available for consultation if you have any problems. The site may be entered through the course site ( under "links to electronic texts."
The cross-section of women who studied the natural or social sciences and who traveled sometimes close to their homes and sometimes at considerable distance helps us understand something about the nature of place and perception. Particularly in the nineteenth century, the phenomena of women traveling, recording their experiences, and in the process changing and being changed by the encounters and travel experience, became more common. While it is tempting to look for commonalities and patterns, a review of even a few books written by scientific women travelers reveals just how complex and varied their experiences turned out to be. The "social reconstruction" of their experiences is important in the context of their scientific work.
| Tiger and tiger-lily She plays a double part, All woman in the body And all man in the heart. She shall be brave and tender, She shall be soft and high, She to lie in my bosom And he to fight and die. - Robert Louis Stevenson about his wife, Fanny |
Assignment
Your assignment is to read two or more of these accounts and write a three or four page essay about the individual travel writers and the relationship between them. In some cases there are sharp contrasts and in others there may be more similarities. Consider the purposes of each author, her specific experiences while traveling, the style of her presentation, and the meaning of her work. You may find it useful to look at the books by Barbara Gates and Vera Norwood on women naturalist writers, although neither focuses on women travelers but both are very conscious of women’s styles and goals as naturalist or scientific writers. The women naturalists section has four individuals currently on line (Akeley with username: etext (contact sgk@mailbox.mail.umn.edu or fost0034@tc.umn.edu for password), Cooper, Stopes, and Traill; but you may also want to use Kingsley or any of the other travelers who are systematic in their observations). We will use your written assignments as the basis for our class discussions.
Observations
In reading these accounts, there were a spectrum of relationships and patterns within the accounts of the travel experience. Your paper may want to play on some of these kinds of themes, situating your particular sources in ways that acknowledge their particular situations.
Some that seemed to me to be of interest were:
–planned scientific work — unexpected opportunity and shifting agendas
–sensibility and attention to women’s appropriate roles — rejection of social norms
–efforts to understand and document large concepts like evolution or race – close attention to the local
–excitement at new discovery and the exotic — naturalizing the experience into something familiar
–deliberately female style of writing — careful intgration of contemporary scientific norms
–empathetic attitude toward nature — understanding the scientific enterprise as primarily objective
Women Naturalist Travel Text Project
The overall goal of the ETRC project is to digitize women’s travel writings, primarily from 1830 to 1930, so that they are available on line and more accessible for research through the software’s full text search capability. Each text has been selected for its representation of how women have viewed and recorded their experiences beyond domestic or even traditional working spaces. Project texts are selected for their perspective on travel areas of general interest, their broad availability, and their interests for classroom and research use.
Every text in the project for which there are copyright privileges can be searched using keywords The keyword search can be executed for a single text or for all the women’s travel writing texts. For ever occurrence of the keyword in the text or texts, the system acknowledges it as one "hit." The number of hits for each text or each chapter in a single text, if applicable, is displayed on the screen and also highlight in the text for review. There is also an expanded search capability in which the program will not only highlight and count every occurrence of the entered keyword but each cognate or synonym listed in the software’s thesaurus.
One unique feature of the University of Minnesota’s digitization project is our addition of interpretive tags in the texts. These tags are used to identify particular characteristics within the texts that we feel are significant elements of women’s travel writings. While each book in the compilation will ultimately contain three basic tags (gender, occupation, and modes of transportation), the naturalist texts will also include interpretive tags for scientific disciplines, techniques, and supporting institutions.