Just Finished Reading: The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt – Women Travellers and Their World by Mary Russell (FP: 1986) [224pp] 

Women have been travelling, either alone or in company, since beyond recorded history. Fortunately, once records began to be made, kept and survive into the present, we’ve had their experiences put down for posterity. The reasons for these treks into the wild and on dangerous roads are as varied as the women themselves – pilgrimage, voyages of discovery, finishing a task that their husband had started and failed at, missionary work either alone (rarely) or as part of a group or couple, scientific endeavour, or for the sheer joy of travel and knowing what is on the other side of the hill – and often as not being the first (white) person to see it. 

As you can imagine, the number of women who undertook such trips and left sufficient records behind are practically numberless so picked the few to represent the many would be a difficult task for anyone. Which made me wonder why exactly the author picked the women she did. Sure, they were adventurers and sure many of them became famous (or as likely infamous) in their lifetimes, but I couldn’t help but wonder over the author’s definition of ‘travel’. For instance, she had quite a little section on female pirates. Now, I’m the first person that I would, and indeed did, find the history of women pirates to be interesting in and of itself, but ‘travelers’? Really? Likewise, mountain climbers. There have been, and continues to be, some very competent mountain climbers across the globe and they should be rightly admired for their skill and bravery, but ‘travelers’? Again, pioneering aviators – certainly amongst the most famous women of the 20th century and rightly so, but again ‘travelers’? Many of these women certainly traveled to get where they wanted to be but the travelling was not the core reason for doing so. They might have traveled to a particular mountain in a remote region, but the travel was incidental to the climbing. Personally, I’d call such people mountain climbers rather than travelers who just happened to climb an odd mountain or two. Am I being pedantic? Slightly, yes but you get my point. The author could, and in my opinion should, have spent more time on actual women travelers and had less of a scattergun approach to her subject matter. 

But this does not mean that this slim volume was a bad book. It wasn’t. It was a little too chatty and somewhat less rigourous than it could have been – plus I couldn’t help noticing that it was VERY 80’s with a strange mixture of feminism and, from a 21st century PoV, sexism (together with a slight unconscious racism). However, as a primer to the subject it was definitely a reasonable read and would prompt anyone, me included, to know more about this fascinating topic. Worth a read if you can find a copy. More, as always, to come. Oh, and I almost forgot... Can we spend just a moment marvelling at the book's wonderful title.

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