Traveling Women Professionals

Traveling Women Professionals: A Transnational Perspective on Mobility and Professionalism of Four Women at the End of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doctor philosophiae (Dr. phil.) der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Rostock vorgelegt von Peter Diderich, geb. 17.10.1983 in Rostock aus Rostock Rostock, 22.12.2017 Verteidigung: 16.07.2018 Gutachterinnen: Gesa Mackenthun, Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Philosophische Fakultät, Universität Rostock Gabriele Linke, Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Philosophische Fakultät, Universität Rostock Joanna Rostek, Institut für Anglistik, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen https://doi.org/10.18453/rosdok_id00002667 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. A Transnational Perspective on Women’s Careers 6 1.1. Theoretical Background to a Transnational Approach 6 1.2. Methodological Considerations 12 1.3. Thesis Outline 21 2. Starting a Career: Entering The Disciplines 24 2.1. Transnational Preconditions: Education and Aspirations 24 2.2. Early Engagements and Acceptable Positions 34 3. In-Between Worlds: Traveling Careers 44 3.1. In the Field, on the Front Lines, and in the War Zones 48 3.2. The Atlantic: An Ocean of Passages, Myths, News, and Networks 72 3.3. The Cost of a Transnational Life – Nowhere Home? 94 4. Professionalizations – Beyond the Frame 110 4.1. Home and Abroad: Multiplicity of Social Roles 112 4.2. Connections and Contestations 134 4.3. Transnational Feminism: Suffrage, Western Ideologies, Global Sisterhood 166 4.4. More Lives Than One: Disappearing and Disintegrating Careers 189 4.5. On the Tangibility of Absence: Legacies, Heritages, and Transnational Archives 209 5. The Multifaceted Female Voice: Travel and Language 233 5.1. The Female Imperial Gaze and the Picturesque Aesthetic 233 5.2. Multilingualism and Transnational Publishing Strategies 273 Closing Remarks 290 List of Illustrations 297 List of Abbreviations 297 Bibliography 298 Introduction In 1996, noted historian Natalie Zemon Davis found that “the genre of women’s history is no newcomer on the scene.”1 Years before Davis’ statement, Gerda Lerner remarked in her book The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979) that feminist authors had been writing for decades about women from the past, but their work had not been acknowledged as a part of the general historiography.2 More importantly, she noted that the most striking fact about the historiography of women is the general neglect of the subject by historians.3 Exactly thirty years later and after research on women had since permeated through various theoretical and methodological developments, Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser acknowledged in Gendering Historiography: Beyond National Canons (2009) that Lerner’s critique still holds true and “writing back their names back into public memory is an ongoing enterprise.”4 In other words, according to Rosi Braidotti, women’s history has always engaged in acting against the mainstream, enacting a rebellion of subjugated knowledges.5 In the context of this effort, since its very emergence, women’s history at its core has always been occupied with “making visible different voices, tracing how women’s and feminist subjectivities changed over time and space,”6 making visible the invisible,7 a “restitution of subjectivity,”8 finding lost voices, “giving voices to the unheard” and counteracting hegemonial silencing (e.g. Gayatri Spivak’s explorations on language and subaltern voices),9 writing back those who had been written out, or, as Patricia Fara in Pandora’s Breeches (2004) argued, who had “never been written in.”10 With this in mind, as David Lowenthal once found that “the past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today’s predilections,”11 as a scholar, it is thus necessary to take on the responsibility for the unspoken and unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present.12 1 Davis, “Women’s History in Transition” 83. 2 See Degler, “American Historiography” 719. 3 See Lerner, Majority Finds Its Past 3. 4 Epple/Schaser, “Multiple Histories” 10. 5 See Braidotti, Nomadic Subects 60. 6 Bonfiglioli, “Nomadic Theory” 203. 7 For example, Anne F. Scott’s book Making the Invisible Woman Visible (1984). 8 See Brott, Architecture 79. 9 As Eleneanor Ross asserted that the “Western perspective, then, is crucially superior to that of the subaltern: those with the power to speak speak for those who cannot” (Ross, “Spivak” 387). It is therefore that Spivak claims: “if you are interest in talking about the other, and/or making a claim to be the other, it is crucial to learn other languages” (Spivak, “Politics of Translation” 215). 10 Fara, Pandora’s Breeches 19. 11 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country xvii. 12 See Bhabha, Location of Culture 18. 1 Recent studies like Patricia Schechter’s Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary (2012) have shown that traveling was an integral part of the lives and work of women in history, as well as that transnational approaches can be utilized for analyzing the various border crossings of these women. This dissertation follows this understanding by focusing on the lives of four women at the fin de siècle and by employing a transnational approach to examining the lives and careers of these traveling, working, and knowledge-producing women that had only marginally been explored via previous approaches, since these transnational approaches yield important insights into the interconnectedness of travel, lives, and careers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The four women of this study are Miriam Florence Leslie, Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, Zelia Magdalena Nuttall, and Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, whose lives have eluded previous mainstream elaborations precisely because of their transgressive nature. Miriam Leslie (1836-1914) was not only a business icon at the turn of the century. In the many years before the fin de siècle, Leslie had already traveled across the Atlantic and the Caribbean as well as across the North American continent. Her travel writing, e.g. California: A Pleasure Trip from Gotham to the Golden Gate (1877), as well as her various articles on Latin and South American countries, are as equally influenced by her ability to travel as her domestic journalistic pieces that show the clear influence of her mobility. Alice Dixon Le Plongeon (1851-1910) who together with her husband traversed the Atlantic Ocean from Great Britain into the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula, where she excavated and photographed Mayan ruins, found great inspiration for her subsequent work. Her travel account Here and There in Yucatan (1889), as her many popular pieces in American journals and magazines, her literary writings such as Queen Móo and the Talisman (1902), “A Dream of Atlantis” (1910-11), and her many public lectures on the culture and archeology of Yucatan were all enabled by her ability to travel in the Yucatecan region. Thirdly, the archaeologist and historian Zelia Nuttall (1857-1933) was a highly mobile individual, traveling to exhibitions, conferences and meetings, and presentations and performing field research in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The travel not only influenced her publications such as Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations (1902) but also fed into her ability to trace manuscripts across national borders while editing and publishing them, as in the case of previously unknown Spanish sources for New Light on Drake (1914). Lastly, Lady Drummond-Hay (1896-1946) was a successful journalist and intrepid aviator known for her transatlantic crossings aboard the airships Graf Zeppelin in 1928 as well as the successful circumnavigation in 1929 and her activities as president of the Women’s International 2 Association of Aeronautics (WIAA) from 1932-1942. Being associated with the Hearst Press and the North-American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), her journalistic career was greatly infused by travel; her travel writing as well as her commentaries on international politics in outlets such as The New York Times or The Sphere were only made possible by her mobility. Previously, the lives and work of these four protagonists who all share extensive travels and professional engagements spanning across emerging disciplinary boundaries as formative experiences had only been marginally reflected in national frameworks during the mid- and late twentieth century. Earlier approaches as well as those that emerged because of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, with their focus on retrieving women from the oblivion of history, were not equipped to fully grasp the various aspects of these women’s respective lives relating to travel and work beyond asking for “notable women.”13 This thesis ties together the divergent social roles the four historic women of this study inhabited both abroad and at home. As geographical mobility was of such great importance to these protagonists, this dissertation acknowledges this traveling as a sine qua non for the application of a transnational approach. It was Eric Lee who, in The Mind of the Traveler (1991), pointed out that “travel is the paradigmatic experience, the model of a direct and genuine experience, which transforms the person having it.”14 Thus, because travel represents a dynamic, kinetic activity that inevitably involves crossing over boundaries and borders, these border crossings are figured as expansive and freeing, implying a desire for more fluid personal and ideological identities.15 The aspect of travel in the context of professional engagement in this thesis follows a statement by Michel Butor, who claimed that agents of the modernist era “travel, in order to write, they travel while writing, because for them, travel is writing.”16 Travel affected the protagonists’ lives and careers on an existential level, creating a “habit of flux”17 that a transnational approach seeks to address from “both the point of departure and that of arrival,”18 also showing a parallel existence of both travel and locality, rather than its linearity in overcoming gendered spheres.

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