During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many British and French men and women traveled to European colonies in Africa, Asia and elsewhere and published accounts of their experiences. These accounts, or travelogues, though as immensely varied in subject matter, style, presentation, and tone as the people who wrote them, still often enough shared many things in common. As first-hand accounts of areas few Europeans would ever get to visit, they played a very important role in shaping and "circulating" popular "attitudes and references" toward the colonies and their peoples. [1] In addition they usually shared an authoritative tone and typically employed binary categorizations such as "masculine"/"feminine" or "civilized"/"barbaric" when describing the peoples they encounter. Finally, although several writers had harsh opinions about some aspects of European colonialism, by and large, they were unwavering supporters of imperialism, and helped to foster imperialist sentiment among the general reading public.
However, despite these similarities, many recent scholars have attempted to draw distinctions between travel writers. In particular, they have applied the category of gender to their studies of travel writing, arguing that women wrote fundamentally differently from men in a variety of ways. [2] Women, it is argued, were often seen to be more inclusive in their subject matter and often wrote about women and other groups typically ignored by male travel writers. In addition, they described the peoples they visited with much more empathy than men, writing more often about them as individuals rather than as archetypal examples of a race. Furthermore, though usually sharing many of the same racial stereotypes and prejudices as male travel writers, women travel writers did not make nearly as many racial generalizations as did men. [3] Moreover, women travel writers were quite different from male travel writers in that they were not beholden to the mainstream imperialist ideologies as deeply as male travel writers were. Unlike these men, who were often ex-colonial officials, army officers, government officials, or those who had business concerns involving the colonies, women often did not have much of a vested interest in the imperial project. Rarely "commissioned to travel," women were not under any obligation to satisfy a patron or a professional reputation. [4] For these reasons, women travel writers were far less likely to echo and to follow the "imperialist party line," and were more inclined to deviate from it and to criticize more openly and directly those aspects of British or French imperialism of which they did not approve. Though still very much imperialists, these women had different conceptions of what imperialism ought to be, differences which resulted from their subordinate position within Victorian society. [5]
