SOURCE: Kollin, Susan. “‘The First White Women in the Last Frontier’: Writing Race, Gender, and Nature in Alaska Travel Narratives.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 18, no. 2 (1997): 105-24.

In the following excerpt, Kollin focuses on Elizabeth Beaman's Alaskan travel narrative in order to explore the intellectual labor that white women performed in claiming a space for themselves in new environments.

New Lands, New Women

The period that gave rise to the United States' quest for a northern frontier also saw the emergence of what historian Walter LaFeber calls the “New Empire,” the project of global economic and cultural expansion that arose after the Civil War.¹ The incorporation of Alaska aimed to secure the nation's hegemonic control across the Western Hemisphere, the extension of its course of empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the “Arctic to the Tropics.”² William Henry Seward laid the foundations for these...