The \u27Emancipated Ladies\u27 of America in the Travel Writing of Fredrika Bremer and Alexandra Gripenberg (original) (raw)
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Journal of International Women's Studies, 2013
The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) and the Finnish Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg (1857-1913), both active women’s rights advocates who toured in the United States in the 1850s and 1880s, respectively, used their travel writing as a powerful medium in promoting their ideological agendas. They articulated their gender politics through presenting American women as pioneers, leaders in women’s suffrage and models of female emancipation. Women’s activism in America was perceptible not only in the formally organized women’s rights movement but also in various reform movements (abolitionism, temperance, and labor movements) that contributed to women’s suffrage on a worldwide scale. As the century progressed, the women’s rights movement grew into an international collaboration of people and associations dedicated to a common cause. The travel writing of Bremer and Gripenberg offers a view of the century plagued by anxieties about gender, while it serves to advance the writer’s ideological beliefs. Thus, in addition to using fictional works and journalism to advance women’s causes, Bremer and Gripenberg instrumentalized their travels as they addressed their audience of like-minded women in their own countries—as well as abroad—informing, influencing, and empowering them. Indeed, as scholar Jennifer Steadman suggests, “representations of female travellers, like their travel texts, were gaining larger audience and were therefore impacting cultural ideas about women, travel, national identity, and citizenship” (60). It can be argued that following the model set by the “emancipated ladies” of America, women’s rights advocates in Europe, like Bremer and Gripenberg, together with international women’s associations whose concern was women’s strive for independence, contributed to a universal suffrage reform in such countries as Finland, leading women towards inclusion in full citizenship.
Reflections on Twentieth-Century American Women's History (1)
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Transatlantic Women's Literature
2008
In Transatlantic Women's Literature, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson has produced a complex, nuanced and intricate study belied by the book's seemingly unencumbered title. Through an engaging mix of literary and cultural theory and close reading case-studies, Macpherson presents a cross-section of (primarily) contemporary female-authored transatlantic literature, in the process highlighting the diverse and vibrant nature of the genre. Crossing the border from fiction into memoir and travel literature, Macpherson also challenges the parameters of Transatlantic Studies. Indeed, throughout the book she shows a deep commitment to furthering and expanding the scope and remit of this relatively recent field of study, even expanding geographical boundaries to encompass Canada, South America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Most significantly, in Transatlantic Women's Literature Macpherson aims to foreground gender as a central categorisation of difference in transatlantic literature: 'What all these fictional travel narratives have in common is a sense that gender is a condition which impinges upon-even determines-the travel experience' (2008, p. 26). Positioning her work firmly within a post-structuralist feminist framework, she contests the suggestion that the 'loosening of cultural constraints' might negate the significance of gender in women's travel experience: '[I]t appears that the opposite is true; gender remains a key concern throughout the twentieth century in relation to nationhood, nationality, identity and travel' (2008, p. 2).
Introduction: (Hi)stories of American Women: Writings and Re-writings
Transatlantica
After more than four decades of development in the United States and elsewhere, women's and gender history has become a recognized academic field, and continues to engage scholars and the general public in several interpretive debates on the status of women in American society (Dayton and Levenstein; Thébaud; Pfefferkorn). Such debates are fueled by contemporary social and cultural trends-particularly the crisis of democracy and the evolution of power relations in connection with the influence of social media, the persistent prevalence of race in politics, the redefinition of minorities and multiculturalism, or the renewed controversies over victimization and agency. In the first stages of its development, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the primary goal of women's history was to make women visible in a historical narrative dominated by and centered on white men. After the pioneering works of William Chafe, Gerda Lerner and Paula Giddins, the trend has continued to this day. 1 The titles of some publications are strikingly explicit about the issue of invisibility (Barnett; Browning; Frear; Sartain; Scott). The following stage, in the 1980s and 1990s, consisted in reexamining categories by taking into account the influence of social, economic, and political factors in the shaping of individual identities-with a growing emphasis on class and race. It was in this second stage that the redefinition of sex and race as constructs complicated the interpretive frame by insisting on the diversity of female experiences, warning against the pitfalls of essentialism (Janiewski; Spelman; Collins; Jones; Ruiz). From the 1990s on, scholars and commentators insisted on the importance of using a greater range of sources; focusing on different groups; and using a diversity of scales: local, regional, and global. 2 The key concepts that came to the fore in this process-such as agency, empowerment, and intersectionality-have become central to any discussion of women and gender in American history, the landmark publication in that respect being Kimberlé Crenshaw's 1989 article, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" (Crenshaw; Nash).