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Dissertation Information for Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman

NAME:
- Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2000)

ADVISORS:
- Frances Smith Foster

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Mary E. Odem
- Martine Watson Brownley

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Travel writing and resistance: A feminist reading of travel narratives by African American and Euro-American women, 1820--1860

Abstract: Travel narratives written by Euro-American and African American women during the early nineteenth century challenge widely held notions about who was writing and traveling during this time period. Written between 1820-1860, diverse working middle-class women's travel texts resist and dismantle social constructions of race, class, and gender. Closely reading travel writing written for publication as well as letters and diaries, this project expands current understandings of the travel genre by revising existing formulations of the traveling subject to include non-elite women and considering the social protest evident in marginalized women's texts. Negative reactions to these unconventional women travelers, recorded in their texts and in other contemporary sources, illustrate the social forces arrayed against both black women's and white women's autonomy in nineteenth-century American culture.

Unlike the stereotype of the Victorian matron traveling in luxury, these women travel without male guardians or economic resources. Working middle-class women traveled in search of new markets for their skills and wider job opportunities than they found at home. Daring to be unfeminine, some women travelers encountered social and physical danger on their journeys. Scenes of physical danger focus attention on the traveler's female bodies and their trespass into the masculine arena of travel and adventure. Violating tenets of femininity that would confine them to home and family, they faced reprisal for their transgressive behavior. The stakes were high, but women travelers undertook the risks in order to gain economic security, to practice racial uplift, and to contest unjust political and social practices. Contrasting the utopian possibility of the places they visit with the disappointing reality of American society, these authors reinforce their censure of race, class, and gender inequities back home in the northeastern United States. Overtly political in their themes and messages, these women's texts challenge the assumption that nineteenth-century women's writing was focused primarily on domestic issues.

Reading the lives and writing of travelers such as Mary Seacole, Nancy Prince, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anne Royal, Amy Morris Bradley, and Frances Wright invites us to broaden definitions of the traveling subject and complicate understandings of women's experience in the last century.

MPACT Scores for Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman

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TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-02 23:05:03

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