Dea Birkett

Doing it for themselves

Often, they were just as bad as their male counterparts

They cut virgin paths through tropical forests, paddled dugout canoes over West African rapids, sailed along the Yangtze in a sampan, climbed the Rocky Mountains with a gun-toting guide, galloped across the Iraqi desert in search of sheikhs, slept under the stars and ate a lot of snake.

It’s easy to be seduced by the exploits of the Victorian women travellers. Broadcaster Mariella Frostrup pays homage to ‘their courage, curiosity and pioneering spirit’ in her new book, Wild Women and Their Amazing Adventures Over Land, Sea and Air, a collection of 50 pieces of travel writing by women. Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, now revived by the National Theatre in London, features the 19th-century traveller Isabella Bird in the cast of celebrated proto-feminists.

The fabulous image of the black-clad, umbrella-shaking, girdle-wrapped, convention-breaking Victorian woman explorer still struts forcibly through the pages of books and across the stage. But these figures are anything but exemplary role models for our daughters. They were women-hating imperialists. They were just as tyrannical as their male counterparts.

It’s not difficult to understand why. While they were condemned to be invalids at home, they were Samsons abroad. Isabella Bird — who features in Wild Women as well as Top Girls — spent most of her life in Scotland crippled on a couch, suffering from a series of unidentifiable illnesses. Then, aged 40, an insightful doctor made an unusual prescription — travel — to cure her depression. The ailing spinster embarked on journeys through America, China, Japan, Korea, Persia, Kurdistan and Tibet, no longer a feeble dutiful daughter. Gertrude Bell, who in 1888 gained first-class results in modern history at Oxford but, as a female candidate, wasn’t awarded a degree, wrote from Syria, ‘In this country they all think I was a Person!’

Isabella Bishop (Photo: Getty)

Being a ‘Person’ meant they held sway over scores of semi-naked men who guided them through the bush, steered their canoes and carried their extensive luggage.

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