CLASSICS 21N: Did Women Travel? A Digital History

Please note, course moved to Spring Quarter.

Course Description

Gender and mobility have long been intertwined, from the confinement of women within the home in ancient Greek democratic Athens to the tailored guidelines for women traveling solo today. We will explore the question of women and travel with a focus on the eighteenth century, when tens of thousands of British travelers journeyed to Italy— voyages known then and since as the Grand Tour. These travels in the age of Enlightenment contributed to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, of ideas about education and leisure, all of which reverberate still today in our own models for tourism and educational travel, and for the genre of travel writing. 

The eighteenth-century Grand Tour has long been studied as the purview of young and male elites, traveling to become ‘citizens of the world’ before taking up their positions in society, inheriting family titles and entering marriages. Yet we know that women also traveled and a few even published their accounts, while the question of gender sex during visits to Italy was prominent. What can we learn about women traveling to Italy in the eighteenth-century and about contemporary ideas, and anxieties, about gender and sex in Italian journeys? We will use a variety of sources and methods. We will visit the Special Collections and the Rumsey Map Center in the Stanford Library to study rare historical books, manuscripts and maps, but also use digital tools for exploration and analysis of online collections and databases of textual and visual material. Part of our work will include experimentation with and contribution of credited research to an original dataset of hundreds of eighteenth-century women travelers to Italy that I have been creating.