American activists Margaret Fuller, Ida B. Wells [Barnett], Angela Davis, and Minnie Bruce Pratt find as they travel continents and communities away from the U.S., in Fuller's words, "an atmosphere to develop me in ways I needed." In addition to this, these American feminists who earned their incomes as writers of newspaper copy and publication of longer essays, recorded their observations of a "stripping away [of] layer after layer," in Pratt's words, "of my false identity, notions of skin, blood, heart" that were based on American racial conceptions. As each woman reports, travel expanded her intellectual challenges, political awareness, educational interactions, interest in grassroots groups, and keenness of personal-interacting-with-political perceptions. In travelling and writing--often as exiles more than journalists--each of these women considers questions of freedom, race, and gender while creating also a social history.
Margaret Fuller travels first within the U.S. then on to Great Britain, France, and to a longer sojourn in Italy, from 1847-9; both letters and newspaper dispatches inform readers of her intellectual commitments, ideological development, and personal transformations. Ida B. Wells is exiled from Memphis, Tennessee, by white mobs who destroy her newspaper presses as a response to Wells' anti-lynching crusade; it is this crusade for justice which takes Wells to Great Britain, first in 1893, and again in 1894. Each of these women--one white, one black--considers race and class as well as gender in her cross-cultural travels. A century later, both black revolutionary feminist activist Angela Davis and white lesbian feminist activist Minnie Bruce Pratt pen memoirs in which travelling--as metaphor and physical absence from "home"--creates "upheaval, not catastrophe" as each sloughs off old constructions while engaging in physical and intellectual travels based on personal/political struggles and curiosities.
In this paper, I will analyze select travel writings by four American activists in order to describe the ways in which cross-cultural and cross-racial "travelling" has shaped--and continues to--ideas and practices of U.S.-based feminist activists.
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