Synopses & Reviews
Womenand#8217;s travel narratives recording journeys north and south along the eastern seaboard and west onto the Ohio frontier enhance our historical understanding of early America. Drawing extensively from primary sources, Traveling Women documents womenand#8217;s role in westward settlement and emphasizes travel as a culture-building event.
Susan Clair Imbarrato closely examines womenand#8217;s accounts of their journeys from 1700 to 1830, including Sarah Kemble Knightand#8217;s well-known journal of her trip from Boston to New York in 1704 and many lesser-known accounts, such as Sarah Beavisand#8217;s 1779 journal of her travel to Ohio via Kentucky and Susan Edwards Johnsonand#8217;s account or her 1801and#150;2 journey from Connecticut to North Carolina.
In the womenand#8217;s keen observations and entertaining wit, readers will find bravado mixed with hesitation, as women set forth on business, to relocate, and for pleasure. These travelers wrote compellingly of crossing rivers and mountains, facing hunger, encountering native Americans, sleeping in taverns, and confronting slavery, expressing themselves in voices that differed in sensibility from male explorers and travelers.
These accounts, as Imbarrato shows, challenge assumptions that such travel was predominately a male enterprise. In addition, Traveling Women provides a more balanced portrait of westward settlement by affirming womenand#8217;s importance in the settling of early America.
Review
and#147;Susan Clair Imbarrato has done yeoman service in her new book...taking the mission of social historyand#151;to illumine the lives of ordinary people and everyday lifeand#151;mixing it with literary analysis, and making it her own..... In her hands, a simple story of pioneer men wrestling the west into submission is complicated and enriched by the women who traveled, both with men and on their own.and#8221;
and#151; Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Review
and#147;Each chapter bursts at the seams with examples of early women travelers who often were moving to new parts of the expanding Anglo-American territories.and#133;As men typically have been imagined as the solo participants in these nationalistic endeavors, these womenand#8217;s observations supply a necessary alternative vision of early American travel.and#8221;
and#151; Legacy: Journal of American Women Writers
Review
and#147;There is fresh detail in these pages so that even an experienced reader will find much that is useful in new research.and#8221;
and#151; American Studies
Synopsis
A study, with the actual accounts, of early American women's travel writings. Together these records and the editor's analysis, challenge assumptions about the westward settlement of the US and women's role in that enterprise.
About the Author
Susan Clair Imbarrato is an associate professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead. She is the author of Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth-Century American Autobiography.