SOURCE: Ciolkowski, Laura E. “Traveler's Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 2 (1998): 337-66.

In the following excerpt, Ciolkowski argues that far from undercutting bourgeois womanhood and presenting a story of female liberation, Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa establishes the author's gendered identity.

I.

Fettered as women are in highly civilized countries by restraints, obligations, and responsibilities, which are too often arbitrary and artificial … it is natural enough that when the opportunity offers, they should hail even a temporary emancipation through travel.

Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century (1883)

If I had sufficient strength of mind I would wear [a Mohammedan hat] myself, but even if I decorated it with cat-tails, or antelope hair, as is usually done, I do not feel I could face Piccadilly in one; and you have no right...