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THE AMERICAS

Before 1840, when travel across the Atlantic was still by sailing ships, few women came to the Americas for pleasure. Some, like Maria Graham and Frances Calderon de la Barca, followed husbands who were sea captains or diplomats. Others took it upon themselves to come as social observers and critics. Harriet Martineau, for example, visited the United States in 1834 specifically to conduct a two-year sociological study of “the actual workings of republican institutions.”


 

 


Maria Graham. Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and Residence there during the years 1821, 1822, 1823. London: Hurst, Rees, Orme et. al., 1824.

Maria Graham (1785-1842)

Graham's Journal is one of the few direct accounts of the independence movement in Brazil. She lived in Brazil at a key historical moment and met major political figures of the day.

Maria Graham was a Rear Admiral's daughter, married to a sea captain. The Grahams met on a long voyage to India, traveled to Ceylon together and then to Chile (1821), when her husband died en route. Maria stayed for a year in Chile, sailed to Brazil in 1823, and then back to England in 1826-27. She then remarried and continued to travel in Europe and to write books.


 

Frances Calderon de la Barca (1804-1882)

This is the earliest direct account of Mexico written by a woman. Frances Erskine Inglis, born in Scotand and raised in Massachusetts, married the Spanish Minister to the United States, Don Angelo Calderon de la Barca, in 1838. She traveled with him to Mexico in 1839, when he was appointed Spanish ambassador there. Her travel book gives a lively and intelligent account of nineteenth-century Mexican life, culture and politics (including two revolutions).

Life in Mexico, during a Residence of Two Years in that Country. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.


Frances Trollope. Domestic Manners of the Americans. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.

Frances Trollope (1780-1863)

Mrs. Trollope’s first and best-known book, first published in 1832. Her scathing criticism of their “domestic manners” scandalized Americans. She concludes, “…of the population generally as seen in town and country, among the rich and poor, in the slave states and in the free states … I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, and I do not like their opinions.” Domestic Manners was an instant best seller in New York and London.
Autograph letter to Frances Trollope from Frances Wright. September 17, 1827.

[click on image to enlarge]

[click on image to enlarge]

Frances Trollope actually came to America intending to assist her friend Frances Wright at the utopian colony Wright had founded in the wilds of Tennessee, called Nashoba. The two women idealistically planned to run an experimental school for the education of freed American slaves. Trollope found the place a desolate mess and “convinced that every idea I had formed of the place was untrue,” fled.

 


Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)

Martineau was a feminist, early sociologist and prolific author. She wrote two travel books about the United States after a trip there in the 1830s - Society in America and Retrospect of Western Travel.

Martineau is quite upbeat and complimentary about the United States in Retrospect, probably in reaction to Trollope’s slap in the face to Americans.

Harriet Martineau. Retrospect of Western Travel. London: Harper and Brothers, 1838.


Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858)

Meine zweite Weltreise. Vienna: C. Gerold's Son, 1856.

Part Three of a German edition of Pfeiffer’s Second Journey Round the World, containing her travels to California and South America.


AMERICAN LADY TRAVELERS

The first American women’s accounts of travel abroad did not appear until the 1830s. The best-known American women travelers include: Nellie Bly, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Hawthorne, Nancy Prince, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Bullock Workman.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co., 1854.

After the great success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both in America and abroad, Beecher Stowe toured Europe three times between 1853 and 1859. This book describes her experiences there and the literary friendships she formed with George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.

Mrs. Workman being pulled from a crevasse

Fanny Bullock Workman. In the Ice World of Himalaya. New York: Cassell & Co., 1900.

Bullock Workman is one of the great American lady travelers and a dedicated supporter of women’s rights. She was an award-winning mountaineer and a surveyor who, along with her husband, made eight expeditions to the Karakorams.

 

finis.

 wilder shores exhibit home | europe | russia | turkey | the middle east | india and the far east | africa | the americas | credits

© 2007 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

Wilder Shores is organized geographically, loosely following the structure of Barbara Hodgson’s book No Place for a Lady: Tales of Adventurous Women Travelers. (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2002). The exhibit features books and manuscripts, both by and about, women who traveled to these regions:

Europe
Russia
Turkey
The Middle East
India and the Far East
Africa 
The Americas

Credits