'Skirts must be girded high': Spaces of subjectivity and transgression in post-suffrage American women's travel writing

This project inquires into the ways that African American and white women's narratives of self-representation situated "traveling selves" in relation to the feminine ideals of the post-suffrage 1920s consumer culture and the troubled decade following the "Great Crash." Engaging debates over subjectivity, mobility, and ideology from the fields of cultural geography, materialist-feminist theories of culture, and travel studies, it reads women's travel in relation to the contexts of new womanhood, fordist shifts in labor, and the emergence of the United States as a global economic power. Cultural representations of travel and gender in the forms of popular fiction, advertisements, niche market publications, and news media are also examined. Through travel narratives it explores the contradictory pressures on the female subject during this period and considers the ways women used travel and writing as ways of coping with the untenable prospects for achieving coherent identities and agency within a culture of contradiction. Reading travelers' self-representations in relation to popular identity options for women of the period---the tourist, the consumer, the homemaker, the flapper---the project considers narrative strategies for resisting such prescriptive options and historicizes the configurations of "traveler" alternatives. The intersection of western ideals of travel (as individuality, authenticity, and power) and the contradictory culture of twentieth-century consumer capitalism provided a rich territory of conflict and negotiation for women seeking new forms of self-identification in the wake of feminist advances around suffrage. Travel provided alternate spaces of subjectivity in which women could experiment with transgressive behaviors and cultural identities; specifically, these spaces allowed women to reinterpret and recast dominant discourses of nationalism, individuality, and modernity and rethink what it meant to be an "American woman." There are seven primary travel narratives considered: Tell My Horse: Vodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), by Zora Neale Hurston; Westward Hoboes (1922), by Winnifred Dixon; America: First, Fast, and Furious (1930), by Laetitia Stockett; A Long Way from Boston (1946), by Beth O'Shea; My Wonderful Year (1939), by Zella Turner; Yes, Lady Saheb (1925), by Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson; and Nine Pounds of Luggage (1939), by Maud Parrish.