Cheryl McEwan - Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in Africa

First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2019 by Routledge

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2000 Cheryl McEwan

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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-72564-5 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19179-9 (ebk)

Maps

Table

This book is largely a product of research I undertook while in receipt of a British Academy Scholarship in the Department of Geography, Loughborough University. It is also a product of my revisiting many of the original issues in the intervening years since I completed my thesis in 1995. My original intention was to trace, in some small way, the agencies of women hitherto hidden in histories of imperialism and geography, whilst retaining a critical eye on the production of their imperial and geographical knowledges. In attempting to do so, however, the realization that there are still other histories, other stories to be told, became apparent. This book does not attempt to trace all of these other histories this would be more than a lifetimes work for a small army of researchers but it does attempt to hint at where these other histories might lie. It also attempts to raise issues about the relationship between power and knowledge, issues that are of particular pertinence to academics in the contemporary world.

Many thanks and acknowledgements deserve to be made. I am particularly indebted to my supervisors, Dr Morag Bell and Dr Michael Heffernan, whose support, advice and encouragement during my time at Loughborough and in the years since has been invaluable. I also wish to thank Drawing Office Technician Ann Ankcom (School of Geography, University of Birmingham) for redrawing the maps, and Cathrin Vaughan, Alec McAuley and Ruth Peters at Ashgate for their patience and advice. The research for this book would not have been possible without the assistance of many others in the various institutions in which I have worked. I am especially indebted to Janice Murray at Dundee Museum, who kindly allowed me to invade and colonize her office for three days and provided me with useful sources on Mary Slessor. I am also grateful to Gwynydd Gosling at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute, Christine Kelly at the Royal Geographical Society, Iain Flett at Dundee City Archives, Terry Barringer at the Royal Commonwealth Society, Miss K. Penney at Birmingham University Library, Reverend David Grainger (Principal of St Andrews Hall, Selly Oak), Peter McKenzie (for providing information about Anna Hinderer in personal correspondence), and to the librarians at Rhodes House, Oxford, Cambridge University Library, the South Reading Room at the National Library of Scotland, and the Manuscripts Department of the British Library. I am particularly grateful to Alison Blunt for her characteristic generosity in sharing with me her discovery (courtesy of Mona Domosh) of Beth Urquharts collection of Mary Kingsleys correspondence in Oregon, USA. Having spent two years attempting to decipher Kingsleys notoriously poor handwriting, the transcripts of these letters were a great help to my research. I consider myself privileged to have had access to this archive, a product of years of conscientious research by Beth Urquhart.

Academic endeavour is not performed in a vacuum, and I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Birmingham for their collegiality, friendship and support. I am especially grateful to Mike Bradshaw, John Bryson, Peter Daniels, Nick Henry, Jane Pollard, Alison Stenning and Terry Slater for comments and advice that assisted in the production of this book. Finally, and most importantly, I am eternally grateful to my family and friends, especially my parents, for their love, generosity, support and encouragement.

I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history (Haggard, 1885, 9).

Opening up a space for excluded voices and counter-traditions extending the realm of legitimate geographical knowledge is, of course, a necessary task for any critical history of geography (Driver, 1995, 411).

Situated within the current academic theater of cultural imperialism, with a certain carte dentre into the elite theoretical ateliers , I bring news of power lines within the palace (Spivak, 1985, 360).

The comment above by Alan Quartermain about the exploration of the African continent in Henry Rider Haggards King Solomons Mines could, until recently, have referred to the invisibility of women in histories of both geographical thought and British imperialism. However, in recent years there has been a proliferation of studies on the role of women in the British empire, mainly within anthropology, feminist history and feminist literary theory, but increasingly within geography. The role of women in histories of geography and geographical thought, however, remains a relatively neglected sphere of analysis within the discipline of geography. In this context, the aim of this book is to attempt to write a feminized history of British geographical thought and imperial culture, using the specific example of women travellers in west Africa1 during the nineteenth century.

Histories of geography are continually being recast and retheorized, with authors suggesting new ways of constituting, or challenging the very notion of, the tradition(s) of geographical thought.2 As the quote from Driver suggests, much of the debate surrounds the definition of the boundaries of tradition. Thus, scholars are exploring the spatialization of tradition (Rose, 1995, 415), and the implications for inclusion in/exclusion from these discursive territories. Of particular concern to feminist geographers, and a major focus of discussion in this book, is the explication of the gendered construction of the geographical tradition, the erasure of women and womens voices from histories of geography, and the potential for the recovery of the agency of women in these histories (Domosh, 1991a and b; Rose, 1993 and 1995).