The Female Travel Connection – Welcome Sophie Drescher

Bernhard Struck
Monday 12 September 2016

This term Sophie Drescher is joining us at the ITSH. Sophie is a graduate from Tübingen University where she worked on female travellers and modes of travel writing as part of her final year’s master thesis. Intrigued by the ITHS agenda of bringing transnational history in discussion with spatial history, Sophie decided to join the team. A warm welcome to you, Sophie!

The project in a nutshell:

What do we really know about travelling women, their roles, and the social spaces they occupied around 1800? This study traces European women travellers’ social networks on their journeys through Europe and beyond during the decades around 1800.

Women authors 18th century
Women authors 18th century

The project will examine how women’s travel was planned and how itineraries developed along social and geographical lines, thereby creating transnational European networks. The project, however, is not designed exclusively as a gender-studies project that focuses on solely female authors. It aims to highlight connectivity of women travellers in relation to their male counterparts, as well as in connection to other female travellers and their networks.

This study is underpinned by the hypothesis that political and cultural developments in Europe around 1800 altered established travel routes and opened up new spaces across Europe, especially to the north and east, for travellers to explore. It is key to link the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as this time frame, with its political upheavals and cultural turmoil, meant travellers were caught in a rapidly changing social world. Research has neglected the impact of this crucial time period on travellers’ experiences of social and geographical space, especially with reference to women’s negotiations of ‘space’ and ‘sphere’ in changing European societies.

Traveling during the 18th century
Traveling during the 18th century

The project will provide an enhanced understanding of how women travelled, how travelling changed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will lead to a more nuanced understanding of planning processes, the use of letters of recommendation, the significance of family members and acquaintances, and the influence of the individual’s social network on the individual’s itinerary. By including travel narratives from more than one European region and covering more than one travel destination the study’s findings will offer a broad panorama of European women’s travel activities and be of interest to a broader, European, audience beyond strictly national historiography.

Read more on Sophie’s project.

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