A \u27Female Columbus\u27 in 1887 America: Marking New Social Territory

As a self-styled \u27female Columbus\u27, E. Catherine Bates took a transcontinental journey across North America with a woman companion in the late 1880s and, on her return to England, published A Year in the Great Republic . This paper, following critical theory approaches to the study of travel writing, explores the ways in which several of Bates\u27s many-layered social identities as a woman of the British e lite class came to the fore in her travel narrative. I argue that Bates constructed her narrative primarily around her shifting gender identities- as \u27feminine\u27 and \u27feminist\u27- and suggest that imperialistic writing was less apparent because she was travelling to a place that had an \u27empire-to-empire\u27 rather than a \u27colony-to-empire\u27, relationship to Britain during its \u27Age of Empire\u27. In this paper I am searching for a middle ground between what I have termed \u27modernist\u27 interpretations of women\u27s travel writing and the more recent post-structural interpretations. I make the case that Victorian women travellers\u27 revisionist commentary on gender roles, as well as their observations of domestic scenes, should remain in focus as we continue to mark them for historical study