A woman of keen intellect and prodigious energy, Harriet Martineau transformed the nature of travel writing, making it into an investigative tool of the social sciences, a branch of study in which the provinces of sociology, anthropology, and political science overlap. By extending the boundaries of the genre, she also incorporated women's issues and a pointed concern for the domestic sphere into studies that were intended for a general, presumably largely male audience. In her travel books she presented the domestic sphere as an essential part of society and made the study of household matters a requirement for sociological study. Martineau traveled not as a dilettante tourist nor as a colonizer, but as a professional working woman who was the sole director and organizer of her own journeys. Her travel writing helped establish a definition of the ideal traveler as one sympathetic and sensitive to the culture being...