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Sidonie Smith. Moving Lives: 20th Century Women's Travel Writing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 240 pp. ISBN 0-8166-2875-0, $17.95.
Given our fascination with the connections between motion and gender, and our long history of linking technology and progress, Sidonie Smith's examination of the mutual dependency of these human endeavors is timely. Smith's Moving Lives builds on and expands her earlier work on women's autobiography, textuality, and the body. Here, she reads narratives by women who sought twentieth century versions of the "quest"-making their journeys by foot, animal, rail, air, and car (ships seem to have passed). This organizing principle enables Smith to focus first on the mode of mobility, and explain how that technology affected her subject's performance of gender, subjectivity, and relation to otherness, as well as the modern and anti-modern impulses such travel encompassed.
Smith begins her study by acknowledging scholars who formalized theories of travel and mobility in the early 1990s-Eric Leed, Mary Louise Pratt, and Dennis Porter, among others. Her chapter on the "The Logic of Travel and Technologies of Motion" summarizes much from these authors' assessment of travel and travel writing as masculine, bourgeois, and exoticizing. Smith then shifts to women traveling in various circumstances:
during the early modern period of exploration . . . European women did not actively participate in discovery or in taking possession of other lands . .. some women set out as wives and daughters of chartered families, colonists or missionaries .... Impoverished and dependent women became indentured servants . .. incarcerated and condemned women were transported to penal colonies... thousands of African women were brutally transported ... as slaves. (12)
Smith does not explore women's complicity with...