a new historical geography of the nineteenth-century American West /
Karen M. Morin.
1st ed.
Syracuse, N.Y. :
Syracuse University Press,
2008.
xii, 278 pages :
illustrations ;
24 cm.
Space, place, and society
Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-248) and index.
Introduction: The frontiers of femininity -- Trains through the plains : the great plains landscape of Victorian women travelers -- Peak practices : Englishwomen's heroic adventures in the nineteenth-century American West -- Gender, nature, empire : women naturalists in nineteenth-century British women's travel literature (with Jeanne Kay Guelke) -- Surveying Britain's informal empire : Rose Kingsley's 1872 reconnaissance for the Mexican National Railway -- British women travelers and constructions of racial difference across the nineteenth-century American West -- Postcolonialism and Native American geographies : the letters of Rosalie La Flesche Farley, 1896-1899 -- Mining empire : journalists in the American West, circa 1870 -- Afterword: Imprints on a new historical geography of North America.
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"British explorer and professional travel writer Isabella Bird is, to the modern eye, a study in contradictions. One of the premier mountaineers and world explorers of her generation, she was, in 1892, the first woman elected to London's Royal Geographic Society. And yet Bird's books on her travels are filled with depictions of herself and other women that reinforce the "properly feminine" domestic and behavioral codes of her day. In this fascinating and highly original collection of essays, Karen Morin explores the self-expression of travel writers like Bird by giving geographic context to their work." "Drawing from a rich diversity of primary sources, from published travelogues and unpublished archival sources such as letters and diaries to newspaper reportage, Morin considers ways in which women's writing was influenced by the material circumstances of travel in addition to the various social norms that circumscribed female roles. Ranging in scale from the interior of train cars and the homes of these women to the colonial projects of conquering the American West, the author illustrates how geography was fundamental to the formation of women's identity and greatly influenced the gendered and colonialist language found in their writing."--Jacket.
Frontiers of femininity.
Feminists-- United States-- History-- 19th century.
Suffrage-- United States-- History-- 19th century.