Obtaining “Sympathetic Understanding”: Gender, Empire, and Representation in the Travel Writings of American Officials’ Wives, 1901–1914

How do women’s travel writings affirm official reports about imperial conquest, and how may they offer narratives reflecting other modes of control and subjugation? Of what value are empathy and sorrow in attaining political aims? This essay addresses these issues by focusing on travel writings by wives of American officials during the first decade of American rule in the Philippines. Officials’ wives offer an intimate and sentimentalist account of the ceremonies they participate in, threats of violence, and their pursuit of “sympathetic understanding” between Filipinos and the American official community. Through letters written to families and friends, they provide an “unofficial” story behind the narrative of colonialism and articulate thoughts resulting from their direct personal connection to American empire and its subjects. Their writings reflect their ambivalent position as agents of empire: considering themselves racially superior, these women are subordinate to the prevailing patriarchal order. While participating in the agenda of colonial expansion, they redefine traditional gender roles. The inclusion of women’s travel writing in the present literature broadens, reconfigures, and challenges conventional accounts, revealing reveal incongruities and complicating generally accepted truths about colonial administration, assimilation, and resistance. The texts examined—Helen Taft’s Recollection of Full Years, Edith Moses’s Unofficial Letters of an Officials’ Wife, and entries from the unpublished diary of Nanon Fay Worcester—were produced by spouses of officials in the Second Philippine Commission (the Taft Commission), charged with establishing civil governance in the Philippines from 1900–1902