Women Travelers: Mobility and Writing between the 19th and 20th Centuries

The stories of some women travelers from the 19th and 20th centuries show a conscious effort to build a cultural bridge between two “worlds”: the Orient and the Occident. These women, whose participation in social life was somehow restricted, refused to be limited by the definition of women imposed to them, and transformed their traveling into a way of resistance and social change.

The purpose of this symposium is to look at the life and work of women travelers such as Clotilde Cerdà, Lady Montagu, Teresa Carreño, Emilia Serrano de Wilson or Virginia Vidal. These women, aware of their privileges, used to defend women’s education and their rights in society. In response to statements as “a women should never travel further than 90 km on her own”, some of these women, like Isabelle Eberhardt and Lady Montagu, travelled to Algeria or Istanbul, whether alone or with someone, and the days they spent among those other women of “the other world” made them rethink their way of seeing. Thus, the stories of these women travelers, to whom traveling meant being exposed to continuous judgement, invite us to look in a different light and to consider other interests, and not just those imposed by Europe on Turkey, Algeria and Latin-America.

Activity organized by the UNESCO Chair Women, development and cultures, the project proyecto Géneros y lenguajes en la arabidad contemporánea (PGC 2018-100959-B-100) and the research group Construcció d’identitats literáries contemporánies (CILC) (2017 SGR 1678), in collaboration with the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Coordinated by Mònica Rius-Piniés, Nesrin Karavar and Andrea Villar del Valle (ADHUC-Universitat de Barcelona).

The participants are Amilcar Torrão Filho, and Stella Scatena Franco (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo / PUC-SP), María Jesús Horta Sanz (İstanbul Üniversitesi), À. Lorena Fuster (Universitat de Barcelona), Ada del Moral (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Elizabeth Lauren Hochberg (Washington University).

Online activity. Inscriptions at https://www.eventbrite.es/e/entradas-viajeras-movilidad-y-escritura-entre-los-siglos-xix-y-xx-157509016709.