Sisters Abroad: Constructing the Irish Female Tourist

Abstract

Efforts at defining Irish ways of travelling were focused on women as well as men. Thomas Davis’s ‘Foreign Travel’ contained advice directed at ‘all our brethren and sisters going abroad’: however, the Young Irelander’s sensitivity to gender balance may not have run very deep, as his emphasis on military history and other traditionally masculine pursuits makes clear. When Davis spoke to ‘the historian, the linguist, the farmer, the economist, the musician, the statesman, and the man of science’ in his essays on travel, he generally addressed men, or used masculine pronouns to refer to his ideal tourist. The only scenarios which he explicitly offered to female readers stereotypically cast them as sensitive creatures who would best respond to local landscapes: ‘we whispered to our countrywomen that the sun rose grandly on Adragool, that the moon was soft on Lough Erne (“The Rural Venice”), and that the Nore and Blackwater ran by castled crags like their sweet voices over old songs’. Like many occupations, travel—and foreign travel in particular—was not an obvious pastime for women in the Victorian era: the ‘angel in the house’ was largely supposed to stay within the domestic sphere. Female travellers, especially if unaccompanied by suitable company, seemed boldly adventurous to many, and laid themselves open to negative responses ranging from ‘outright hostility’ to ‘patronising ridicule’. Many women who wrote travel accounts went to great lengths to justify their journeys and often focused on domestic and/or ‘feminine’ concerns abroad. But women undeniably did travel, as is attested by the large number of travelogues published by women, and a tendency among some reviewers to suspect that anonymous travelogues may have been penned by a female hand. Irish women were no exception: A. A. Kelly’s anthology Wandering Women includes work by over twenty Irish travel authors who were active in the long nineteenth century.