Over the past decade, women's travel writing has blossomed, as has criticism of the genre. In particular, Jane Robinson's scholarly works Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travelers and Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travelers have begun to establish for women's travel writing the kind of lineage that Alice Walker urged for women's fiction. Women's early contributions to travel writing was hampered by not only by the general barriers that women writers faced (such as limited access to education and publishing) but by the scant opportunities women had to travel during the "Golden Age" of adventurous journeys that established the genre. Those women who did choose unacceptable destinations risked their reputations
But one female travel writer succeeded despite--indeed thrived on--the scandalousness of undergoing "exotic" travel, and exoticized herself in the process. Through her travel epistles, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu broke ground for future women travel writers and cultivated a persona that defined the sensibility many of her followers would adopt. Of particular interest are her epistles from her 1716 travels in Turkey, which cemented her notoriety in London. Even today, Anglos and Americans "orientalize" Turkey (to use Edward Said's term), a status attractive to women seeking to define themselves as adventurous.
British and American written accounts of travel to Turkey, including Lady Elizabeth Craven's (1862), Freya Stark (1956) and Mary Lee Settle's (1991) follow several precedents set by Lady Montagu. These writers construct daring, unorthodox writing personae; extoll the freedoms of women in other cultures (often in order to make political points for women's rights at home); define their feminism as global; and note parallels between sexism and classism. My paper explores how these concerns are revealed through the authors' depictions of and responses to two Turkish institutions: the harems and hamams (baths). These events are particularly illuminating because they compel the foreigners to confront their own body images and sexuality and place them in intimate contact with Turkish women. None of this is to say that they, or Lady Montagu, escape the solipsism, externalization, and exoticizing common in travel writing of their respective ages.
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