Writing Home

With the advent of steam liners and railroads in the 1830s, international travel became accessible and acceptable for white middle- and upper-class American women. Examining a century's worth of travel accounts, the author of this work argues for the consideration of gender in their reading.

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Before the 1830s, women's travels outside the United States were infrequent and usually undertaken in the company of a male relative. With the advent of steam liners and railroads, however, international travel became an accessible and acceptable activity for groups of white middle- and upper-class American women. Although men had been publishing travel narratives for years, these new women travellers soon discovered that their own writings were popular reading back home. In "Writing Home", Mary Suzanne Schriber offers the first comprehensive analysis of the large body of US women's travel literature written between the pre-Civil War years and World War I. Examining almost a century's worth of published book-length accounts, ranging from the travel diaries of ordinary women to the narratives of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton, Schriber argues for the importance of gender considerations in the reading of all travel texts.
She discusses the differences between men's and women's constructions, in writing, of their experiences abroad - differences that extend beyond mere observations to the way each gender is treated in foreign cultures, responds to them, and seizes the occasion of travel and writing to do cultural work. Schriber accounts for the popularity of travel writing by recognizing that it provided the necessary "others" against which Americans sought to define themselves and their culture during this period. "Writing home" meant not only writing to home but writing about home, redefining "home" from one's perspective abroad. She asserts that US women often appropriated this largely male genre as a way of reshaping accepted social orders at home and redefining their roles as women.