by Nanette Ashby
In this episode, Nanette Ashby is joined by Dr Anna Geurts, a historian whose research sits at the crossroads of gender, disability, race, and the history of travel. Anna’s recently published book brings together years of archival research into diaries, letters, and memoirs to explore how 19th-century travellers from the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and beyond made themselves at home on the road. She explains how ideas of homeliness, cleanliness, and comfort shifted dramatically over the century. Together, we dig into the messy, fascinating work of archival research, the near-invisibility of women, disabled, and working-class travellers in the historical records. How has curiosity itself been gendered by historians?. Anna also gives us an update on the current funding climate for gender and diversity research, and shares an exciting new project retracing a 1932 transatlantic journey from Amsterdam to Paramaribo. From Grand Tours to servant migrations, harems to hospital tourism, this episode is a joyfully curious deep dive into who could travel and who got to tell the story afterwards.
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Mentioned during the episode:
Book: Geurts, Anna. Travel and Space in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/Travel-and-Space-in-Nineteenth-Century-Europe/Geurts/p/book/9781032769790
Articles: Geurts, Anna. “Imagination Over Innovation: The Experienced Freedom of Movement of Nineteenth-Century European Travelers.” Technology and Culture, vol. 66, no. 3, 2025, pp. 675-710. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/965820
Geurts, Anna. “Flânerie as a Mode of Pleasure: Lessons from a Working-Class Flâneuse.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 48, no. 1, 2022, pp. 197-227. https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/286476
Additional Information:
The Grand Tour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
Esme Cleall: https://socialhistory.org.uk/about/people/esme-cleall/
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lady-Mary-Wortley-Montagu
Cornelie van Wassenaer, St Petersburg: https://www.kaycraddock.com/pages/books/176493/cornelie-de-wassenaer/a-visit-to-st-petersburg-1824-1825?srsltid=AfmBOopZie0s-h2o5jKOxZXv8Vph7rlNTSdCYPcVUpfz26bpU2u1y5l1
Go Trabi Go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Trabi_Go
Goethe, Italian Journey: https://italien.expert/en/johann-wolfgang-von-goethes-journey-to-italy/
Marco Polo’s journey: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/10041/map-of-marco-polos-travels-1271—1295/
James Cook’s journey: https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Cook
Verne, Around The World in Eighty Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days
Philomena Essed: https://www.antioch.edu/faculty/philomena-essed/
Ellen Samuels: https://gws.wisc.edu/staff/samuels-ellen/
Ellen and William Craft’s journey: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/william-and-ellen-craft-1824-1900-1826-1891/
ADD SOUND FILE
Episode Transcript:
Nanette Ashby
Welcome to the Gender and Diversity Podcast Culturally Curious, where arts and culture have never been more titillating with me you host, Nanette Ashby.
In this episode, I am joined by Dr Anna Geurts, a historian whose research sits at the intersection of gender, disability, race, and the history of travel. Anna’s recently published book brings together years of archival research into diaries, letters, and memoirs to explore how 19th-century travellers from the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and beyond made themselves at home on the road. She explains how ideas of homeliness, cleanliness, and comfort shifted dramatically over the century. Together, we dig into the messy, fascinating work of archival research, the near-invisibility of women, disabled, and working-class travellers in the historical records. How has curiosity itself been gendered by historians? Anna also gives us an update on the current funding climate for gender and diversity research, and shares an exciting new project retracing a 1932 transatlantic journey from Amsterdam to Paramaribo. From Grand Tours to servant migrations, harems to hospital tourism, this episode is a joyfully curious deep dive into who could travel, and who got to tell the story afterwards.
And without further ado, here is Dr Anna Geurts.
Thank you so much for taking the time. It’s lovely to have you on the podcast. What made you interested in this field of research in the first place?
Dr Anna Geurts
Thank you very much for having me. So this field being “gender”, but also other social parameters, categories, and also being “travel”.
So to start with gender. I think when you grew up either being categorised as a woman in our society or as intersex, it’s inescapable that you become interested in gender because it’s forced upon you. You’re forced to think about it and perhaps to fight the assumptions that come with ideas about gender.
So in the first session of this podcast I mentioned being raised as a female person, or if your sex doesn’t conform to either male or female sex characteristics according to doctors so if you’re intersex then those things almost force you to become interested in the social phenomenon of gender. Or there’s a third reason, if the gender that you feel you are is in conflict with the gender that other people think you are or the gender which you’re raised, so in other words if you have a trans experience that also forces you to think about gender and might make you interested in research in gender as a research topic.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah totally.
Dr Anna Geurts
The next step might be, being forced to think about gender, for instance, makes you realise that there’s many other categories of oppression in our society, in our cultures that also play a role. And that maybe don’t affect me negatively…maybe I actually benefit from them…but that affects negatively other people. Therefore, we do need to think about it. I need to think about, for instance, racialisation, which, in our privileged role as academics, we have a responsibility to also think about. And then, travel, that may be a bit more of a fun story. I like travelling. I was in a secondhand bookshop about 15 years ago when I was preparing to start my Master’s thesis. I was completely open still as to what I was going to do, and I found this secondhand book of travel accounts from 1830 by John Bake, a Dutch professor who travelled to Switzerland alone, leaving behind in the Netherlands his wife and newborn kid, and wrote this very moving set of letters to his wife, but also wrote about all the practicalities of travel, the comforts, the discomforts, discovering ice cream in Italy and finding that so interesting… It was so close to me, not just in the recognition of missing someone on a journey…on quite a long journey, so he went away for several months…but also, again, those less serious aspects of discovering a new culture or a new mode of transport, new patterns of living, new rhythms of when do you go to bed, when do you get up, when do you have breakfast? I just got very interested in how people respond to those intercultural differences of everyday living. I combined the more serious interest in the social oppression and the more fun interest in everyday practicalities in my research.
Nanette Ashby
That’s very interesting. I personally am also very interested in journals and personal accounts of daily life, especially also of travelling. So I’m really interested in how your recent book project is going because you focus on the travel aspect in your book. Could you tell us more about that?
Dr Anna Geurts
So this book that I’m writing now…I’m trying to finish now…is a combination of my two pieces of PhD doctoral research. The first one was about access and accessibility and the second about appropriation of spaces. So how do people make a space their own? I’m now focusing on appropriation. So it’s about a number of themes: homeliness, comfort, physical comfort. So how soft is your chair or how long is your bed? Do you fit in it or not? It’s about sociability. Do you like the company you’re in the train with, or do you not like them? Are they annoying? And dirt and cleanliness. It’s about long-term changes in those things because a lot of scholars, historians have been saying there have been major long-term changes in the 19th century…across the 19th century. When transport modernised, we got new forms of locomotion, new energy sources… So for instance, the steam energy railway network grew. So they’ve been arguing things like…domesticity became more important. People became more attached to cleanliness. People became more attached to their privacy. And they’ve been arguing this for Europe, or mainly for…predominantly for Western Europe.
That is what I investigate, and I’m finding that actually all these changes weren’t so big. All those values, all those spatial things that people attached importance to, they even made important. But sometimes the content changed. So for instance, “homeliness” was important before the arrival of a train network in Europe and was still important afterwards. But at the start of the 19th century, people gave shape to that homeliness by taking more or less their entire home inventory with them on the journey. So they packed a mattress and blankets and sheets and many sets of clothes, chests, teapots, coffee pots, everything you need to run a household. And they took it with them. And I’m talking about British people now, Dutch people, Belgians, Germans…took it with them across Europe and across the world in their colonial endeavour to make themselves feel at home in those different places. They felt they needed stuff from home to feel okay in different places. Now, what changed throughout the 19th century is that around 1900, the ideals had shifted 180 degrees. People now wanted to feel at home anywhere with as little stuff from home as possible. They were actually proud that they could make do without that stuff and adapt to the local cultures. So they said “I’m not, I’m not taking my coffee from home, I’m going the Italian way. I’m travelling to Italy. I’m drinking real Italian coffee from a real Italian coffee cup. And that makes me a good traveller and an interesting person”. So that means that domesticity was still important because people still enjoyed the domesticity that they found elsewhere, but they no longer wanted to do that with stuff from home. That’s one example.
Nanette Ashby
Oh, nice! So people actually started to embrace the local culture and connect the homey traditions, for example, making a cup of tea, having breakfast in the morning, with the local traditions that they were inhabiting at the time.
Dr Anna Geurts
Well, they were trying, they didn’t always manage. Because people were still chauvinists, still attached to their home culture. But they then felt guilty about that. They wanted to embrace…you were a cool person if you managed to enjoy and live the local life.
Nanette Ashby
But it was more an active thought process. It was more a conversation that was actually taking place instead of it being the default to just take everything with you.
Dr Anna Geurts
Exactly.
Nanette Ashby
Also, that must have been a lot of stuff to physically take with you.
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah. This is talking about rich people….
Nanette Ashby
Mm-hmm. Of course.
Dr Anna Geurts
Who had servants and money to hire local people to carry all that stuff for them.
Nanette Ashby
I’m excited to say, your book has been published in the meantime.
Dr Anna Geurts
I’m really happy with that, after many years work it’s been published. People can buy it, on paper, or as an eBook, two of the chapters are also available for free online, open access, through the website of the publisher … also the chapters “cleanliness as progress” and the chapter “the heat, the cold, the wet, the hot and the cramped”, which is a very long title, it is everything to do with how your body, your skin, your bones, your skeleton, how they interact with the environment when you travel … so that’s available now.
Nanette Ashby
Wow, thank you, and the publisher was Routledge, right?
Dr Anna Geurts
It’s Routledge and now it’s Taylor and Francis.
Nanette Ashby
Okay, awesome, and we’ll leave links to the opensource chapters in the shownotes for listeners to check out as well.
As you mentioned, you focused on written documents, detailing trips, for example journals or other writings. What kind of challenges does one face working with that type of sources? Because they’re quite personal sources, and I can imagine looking for specific journals, it might be difficult to find them in the archives. How did you find that?
Dr Anna Geurts
Yes, very difficult to find. So you go to an archive and what you find is a catalogue. Say, for instance, there’s the Duke of so and so, and here’s a set of letters by him. There’s no further information in that catalogue. So you request the actual boxes of letters. So they stack up on your archival desk and you just have to leaf through them. And that’s not so easy because they’re in a handwriting that’s really hard to read and they’re…they can be undated. Sometimes you don’t even know who wrote them because there’s no name underneath. So they may be catalogued as the Dukes’ letters, but are actually the Duchess’s letters. And then you have to figure it out by reading. Turns out someone is talking about their husband, so it’s probably not the Duke in the 19th century. 90% of that time in the archive is spent actually identifying. What is this document I have in my hand? Is it even about a journey? Maybe it’s a diary that stretches three years and there’s five brief journeys interspersed within the diary that actually deals with home. And you have to identify those journeys, again in that hardly legible handwriting. Now that’s only talk about rich people.
And then there’s people who didn’t have so much money who often wrote very little about themselves in their lifetime. So when you talk about less rich people in the 19th century, usually we don’t have any diaries of them. They may not have been able to write them. They may not have had the time to write them. Their families may not have been able to keep them, for instance, because poor families migrate or move house much more often and just can’t take all that stuff with them. And then archives have also, for a long time, been less interested in collecting their belongings. So there’s all kinds of reasons why it’s very hard to find travel accounts by less rich people in archives, even though poor people travelled a lot. As soldiers, as servants…for many reasons, to find a job… But to find their accounts is very hard. And usually, when we do find them, they are memoirs. So these are people who are 60, 70, 80 years old, who may have stopped their working life, are now perhaps taken care of by their children, and they have a bit more time. They sit down, they write their memoir often to their children, giving them life/living advice. And then they can contain a journey. So when it comes to the less rich people in my book, often I base my knowledge on memoirs, so retrospective accounts.
Nanette Ashby
Okay. And when you say “memoirs”, were they also professionally published as books or was it still more of family documents?
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah, usually when we’re talking about not so rich people, these were kept, these documents were kept by their families. And they were sometimes published much later, so perhaps a century later or so. For instance, by local newspapers. So local historians are very important. People who are not part of the university, may also not have a university degree, are not professional historians, amateur historians who write for local newspapers, who work for the local heritage society. They may have found those travel accounts or their memoirs in their village, in their surroundings, and then transcribe them and publish them in a local newspaper, for instance.
Nanette Ashby
Oh, nice! So as you said, you don’t just focus on the Dutch travellers, but also British travellers and other countries as well in Europe. Did you then have to travel to the archives in the different countries to access these documents?
Dr Anna Geurts
So the focus in this book is on people from the northern Netherlands. So let’s say the Protestant region of the Netherlands. And that’s where I went to the archives to find travel writing in handwriting. The accounts I used from Britain, Belgium,. Germany, and I’m talking about the present-day names of those regions, I used published sources in those cases. Okay, so published either in the lifetime of the traveller or afterwards. Yeah, because it’s simply not possible to go to archives in so many…I took so many different archives for one book.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah. Since we were talking: the different types of sources…on the one hand the memoirs, on the other hand, the personal diaries… I can imagine that diaries are quite personal documents. Is there a difference? Or have you noticed a difference in the sources when it was written as a personal recollection versus being published or being written for the family as an official document to keep or to be published?
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah. Interesting. And I get that question a lot also from colleague historians. Partly, no, partly they’re very similar. They’re still part of the same genre. Apparently, people who wrote personally for themselves were inspired by published accounts. Also, partially no, they are the same or similar because even those personal documents, personal handwritten accounts, they circulated in the family.You wrote a letter, well you wrote a letter to your wife at home, but she would then read that letter aloud to your parents or to your siblings. So they weren’t so private always. But partly also, yes, they are different because some people wrote for publication, they wrote in private and then edited their handwriting for publication, and of course they filtered out stuff. So stuff that was politically not so convenient, perhaps stuff that mentioned other people’s names and said something not so nice about them or stuff to do with sex or relationships. That was often filtered out as well. There were a lot of taboos in the 19th century.
Nanette Ashby
What interested me especially about your research was that you also looked at the female view and looked at travel documents written by female travellers. Usually when we think of, for example, the word “Grand Tours”, what comes to mind for me is young men going on their trip to Italy or Greece for half a year or a year as a rite of passage, and usually that does not include female travellers. That’s not a thing we associate with the word “Grand Tours” or “travel” at that time. So I was wondering what promoted the recent scholarly inclusion of female travellers as well in that discussion.
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah. Grand Tours are really mostly something for young boys in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries still, perhaps, to a degree, but women did travel. This is what I’m finding increasingly, as I grow older and more experienced in academia and in research, that often people existed and people did stuff, they travelled or they resisted sexism… There’s all these rich histories, for instance, of women… The place where it goes wrong is in our academic research…is where we don’t see those people, we don’t read about them, we don’t read the texts that they wrote, we don’t publish about them. And that is, like you say, that is the recent thing. Not so recent though. And this comes in waves. Well, it goes back to where we started…
Why is someone interested in gender? Either because it’s forced upon them. So if you are gendered female or intersex, for instance, you are forced to think about gender. And then if you become a historian, it’s likely that you’re interested in gender in the past as well. If you’re a gendered male in our society, and a majority of historians of the 20th century was gendered male, you have less of a personal interest in researching gender, and this has to come out of a wealth of empathy for the struggles of other people, and that is not so self-evident. So as long as a profession, a research community is made up mostly of male researchers, the majority of them will not be so interested in female travellers. So the interest in female travellers has come with the entry of female historians into the profession. Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
That sounds very similar to, for example, medical research: that the more women enter the field, the more research is also done specifically on women’s bodies. But that’s very interesting that that’s across all types of research.
Have you encountered research, exploring the experience of travellers from other minorities? For example, I am specifically thinking of disabled people or BIPOC people. But I can also imagine travelling in the time frame we’re talking about as a disabled person was quite challenging, so I don’t expect there to be many sources or many travel logs that we know of.
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah. And there is a lot, and there will be even more out there than we know of. Firstly, this has to do with how you conceptualise disability and “disability” as a word, as a concept is a…seems to be a fairly recent term, a fairly recent grouping of social disadvantages or oppressions. And, if you go to the 19th century, for instance, you will have to search for different ways or different concepts or different groupings. So someone might be called or calling themselves an “invalid”, for instance, and staying in bed most of the time. But they could still travel if they were wealthy enough to pay people to carry their bed for them. Or someone might be deaf, but that’s a whole different story.
Nanette Ashby
Exactly.
Dr Anna Geurts
And that was not categorised in the same category. Esme Cleall is a historian who worked specifically on deaf travellers, for instance. And blind travellers, yet a whole different story. And again, people are researching blind travellers who did also often… as far as I know, often were wealthy people who paid helpers. And then, yeah, how widely do you conceive disability. Illness, being in pain, having chronic pain can be labelled a disability and a hindrance from travelling, but it can also be a reason to travel. So in the 19th century, many people travelled in order to get better. They went to places like a spa to take the waters, take healthy waters to take a course…well not just of healthy waters, but also of rest or of walking or seeing specialist medical experts. In those cases, your disability or illness or however you conceptualise it, would be a reason to travel. And now going to spa was something that rich people mostly did, but pilgrimage…rich and poor went on pilgrimages. Being ill or feeling ill, or having an impairment would definitely be a reason also to go on a pilgrimage.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah. Especially the pilgrimages as a form of travel. I forgot about that aspect, but obviously the church played a bigger role in the everyday life of people back then. So it would be a more common thing to do or to consider.
Dr Anna Geurts
So I’ve been thinking about that question as well, and we talked earlier about how much gender had an impact on travel. Race and disabling also had a huge impact on the access that people had to places, so we’re talking about 19th century Europe still, and it had this impact through people judging each other through appearances, so people in places that you want to visit judge how you look, and based on that they give you access to a place or not, and their race and disabling, racialisation and disabling, they play a large role across the world. Now for Dutch travellers who stayed within Europe, they did not experience racialisation so much, because most of them were racialised in the same way as those gatekeepers, as the people who gave access to places or barred access from places. So they don’t mention it as they were experienced as white, as people who gave them access. That is a difference in the case of disability, of course disability is a very diverse concept, a concept with many meanings … the way you look at is as judgement, as disabling, as a judgement that people have of you, on the basis of your appearance, and that appears in my book, interestingly, in the section on gender, or not so much in this section but it is echoed by gender as many women who travelled were seen as disabled by their nature of being seen as female, and this happened especially to rich women. They were seen by people as unable, disabled, unable of walking for a long way, or of climbing up hills or towers. So first they were judged for being female and or their appearance and then therefore they could not be allowed to go to certain places …. and then on the basis of that people said, “oh actually, they should not go to those places” … and many women also internalised this, and said of themselves that they were not able, or they said that other women weren’t able. Some people then challenged this, women challenged this and said “no i am able to go to these places” … so this is where I think disability and being gendered as female coincide.
Nanette Ashby
Could that also have something to do with the clothing, the attire that they were wearing and travelling with, that through the limitations of their clothing they didn’t have the range of motion or mobility?
Dr Anna Geurts
And the question is, the chicken and the egg, are people dressed in a certain way … dressing in certain ways because they already feel they cannot do something, and therefore they could just as well wear impractical clothes, or maybe they should wear impractical clothes to stop them from running too fast, but it’s definitely not the case that women had to wear clothes that literally made them unable to walk or climb or run … many women did those things, that’s not a hard technological limit, that’s also a choice and the way people are socialised, to social pressure to do something.
Nanette Ashby
I also just remembered…a friend of mine, she’s a blacksmith, I think you call it…and she really wanted to do an apprenticeship tour, like a pilgrimage…
Dr Anna Geurts
In Germany?
Nanette Ashby
…in Germany, but also through France and to Spain, and she was planning on walking the trip and then working at different stations and learning new techniques on the way. In Germany, there’s still the tradition of carpenters going year long around the country. That’s really interesting that the trade gave people the opportunity to travel and gain new experiences, but also as a way of honing their craft.
Dr Anna Geurts
A very big 19th century tradition was craftspeople going from employer to employer and from master to master learning their craft. Also, outside of carpentry, many crafts did this a little bit similarly, servants in Germany but also the Netherlands between, let’s say ages 12 and 30, would travel from employer to employer, working for each of them for a few years. Could be domestic servants. They could also be farming servants, so day labourers in farms. And you would live with a family who employed you for a year or a few years and then move on to the next. While you did that, you saved up money until you had enough to settle down yourself, buy a house, and form a family. There’s many reasons why less rich people would also travel and have…not just the opportunity, but had to travel as part of what their life course entailed or offered them.
Nanette Ashby
What surprised you doing your research? What are some stories you came across or some insights you gained that you didn’t expect?
Dr Anna Geurts
One of the things that surprised me was the cultural similarities between different social groups. I had been led to expect, by reading historical literature, that women travel differently from men or poor people travel differently from rich people. And of course, to an extent, that it’s true: if you don’t have money to go on a train, but you have to walk, your travel experience will be very different. But culture is still so much shared within a society. So for instance, both rich and poor people who went to a city abroad for very different reasons…one might be giving a lecture and the other might be looking for a job in construction work… But once they were there, they were still both interested in seeing similar touristic sites. They would go to the same churches, the same parks, and the same for men and women. For the most part, their destinations were actually the same and the way they wrote about their destinations were the same. People would go to a hospital in Paris, for instance, and see how people are taken care of there. And the hospital would earn some money through that, presenting themselves as a tourist site. And the tourists would then comment on how clean that hospital was, when it was sufficiently clean. Again, cleanliness was something people of all economic groups would comment on, and also people of all genders would comment on.
Nanette Ashby
Interesting. I didn’t expect that. So what is the context of your research? We’ve been discussing different types of travel, but you have a look at a specific time span, and I was wondering what kind of things travelers would have to take into consideration. For example, nowadays we would have to take Corona measures into consideration, or, you know, if a country is at war currently. Do we know things that people need to take into consideration in the process of planning their trip or during their trip similar to that?
Dr Anna Geurts
So that sounds like the question of accessibility of even why and how do you even go and set out on a journey. And I’m finding that the most important reason or deciding factor is whether you have a reason to go on a journey, and whether the people around you also agree that you have a good reason. Your job has to give you a reason. “I have to make…to establish trade contacts in Paris. Therefore, I go and everyone around me agrees that I can take some time off at home and do that useful thing.” “I have to give a lecture in Paris.” That’s also fine. “I have to find a job in Paris.” Fine. “I have to go to school in Paris…to go to the specialist school…to go to university.” Also fine. No one whose diaries or memoirs I read in the 19th century said, “I’m just going just because I feel like it.”
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, just for fun.
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah. There was always this work or education-related reason. So that’s the first. And then of course there needs to be money to make the journey. But if you had a really good reason, the money might be there. I mean, or you might make it happen. Some people would walk very long distances for many days in order to get somewhere because the reason was strong enough to travel. Then you need travel documents. This was just as well the case in the 19th century. You had to have, for instance, proof of where you were a resident, so that the place where you moved to didn’t feel that if you didn’t find a job there, you would become an economic burden on that new community. Then you had to look the part. You couldn’t access spaces where people looked down on you because of the way you looked. So people excluded each other on the basis of looks. That could be as small as not wearing the right kind of jacket to a certain social gathering, or having just been splattered on by a coach that drove past and being all muddy and then not really being able to go out again.
In my book, I’m not so much looking at race or disabling…disabling of people, racialisation or disabling. I’m looking mostly at gender and professional class. For instance, when it comes to gender, this is where that important…the reason to travel comes in. So often people in the Netherlands did not find that women had a good reason to travel. For instance, if they were not the person making the money for the family, they did not have a reason to find a job abroad or to go on a lecture tour abroad. But the women who did travel, they did go for exactly those same reasons: to find a job, to get education, to give a lecture tour. However, a second reason why women might not travel was because they were either pregnant or breastfeeding or had a sick child. And it was always assumed that you couldn’t travel if you were breastfeeding and that you could not travel if you had a sick child. You had to stay home and take care of it. Whereas for men with children, the assumption was that they would still be free to go anywhere because it was the woman who then had to take care of their child. Not everyone, of course, had family setups with woman, man and child, but in those cases, that was the assumption. The result was, for gender, that less than 10% of the travellers whom I found were women.
Nanette Ashby
Oh, wow.
Dr Anna Geurts
And this is a sample of several thousands of travel accounts that I put in a database. Around 8% of travellers were women across the 19th century. And this only changes at the start of the 20th century. Across the 19th century, the proportion of men stays very dominant. But once women did set out on a journey abroad, like I said, they did similar things to men with one exception, and that was nightlife. Bars, nightclubs, and…we should not forget…and the university. Nightlife and the university were the two…the two domains that were completely appropriated by men and where women were…technically, they were often allowed as, and I’m now talking about women as customers, as visitors… Technically they were allowed perhaps, but socially they weren’t. It was considered too unsafe or not interesting enough for them. That’s, of course, very different when it comes to people working in those sectors. Of course, universities were cleaned by women. Of course, nightclubs employed women. But when it comes to tourists visiting those places, usually women were barred from them.
Nanette Ashby
So also the travel experiences would differ in what kind of experiences you had access to, what kind of contacts you could also make. Were there more options for women in that they could talk to the local women and get a different perspective instead? Or women then just had less experiences or less options?
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah. When it comes to homosocial environments, so male only environments, female only environments, who you were as a traveller gave you specific access. So men at universities, women at a female convents, or in harems. So for instance, the British traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, travelled to Turkey and visited a harem and then wrote about it and proudly wrote, “I, as a woman, have access to this. And I discovered something about Turkish culture here, which most British travellers, being men, cannot.” They don’t get…they can’t get that knowledge.
Nanette Ashby
One of the articles I read by you, you also talked about how curiosity played a role in reasons why people travelled or ventured out of their comfort zone. What exactly do you mean by that? Because we are all curious, but what specific curiosity needs to be there to take the next step to actually plan and go on a trip?
Dr Anna Geurts
And are you referring also to a gender difference here? That’s what I heard earlier.
Nanette Ashby
Yes. Yes. Which genders were more curious and used that as a reason to travel, if publicly or in secret for themselves?
Anna Geurts
Yeah. So many people are curious and also many people are not curious. And some travellers are not curious at all about other…about different cultures.
This goes back also again to the start of our conversation. What I’m finding is not just about what life was like in the 19th century, it’s also about what scholars afterwards have been saying about the 19th century. And one of those things is a gendering of curiosity. And what I mean by that is when male travellers have been curious, they have been labelled “researchers”. And they have a valid reason to be curious. They are “researchers”, they are “explorers”. When female travellers are curious, this is often framed as a negative thing. Researchers have been critical about this. Women gossip. Women are curious about trivial things. Women want to know about women’s lives, about children, about everyday things. Men want to know about the economy or the industry. This is not…this is not actually the case. People show an interest in exactly the same things. Both women and men show an interest in the economy, industry, women’s lives, children’s lives, everyday practicalities. But they have been labelled by researchers and by journalists and by other writers as having different forms of curiosity. And then the male form has been considered a more valid form than the female form. So that is what I try to critique in that article.
Nanette Ashby
I really enjoyed that article. It was very interesting, especially also in regards to the notion of the Grand Tour. In my generation, it’s quite popular that after you finished your first big chunk of education after high school, the notion of the Grand Tour is still quite popular and is having maybe, kind of renaissance in my generation.
Anna Geurts
And it’s nice that that opportunity is still recognised as a beautiful opportunity. But becoming a little more inclusive. And the question of course is: how inclusive is it at the moment? Because you need money to do that, for instance, and you need certain other things as well. But it’s…it’s a tradition that is…that I like as well.
Nanette Ashby
How do these accounts alter our view on travel in those days? More specifically with respect to the term “Grand Tour”. Now that there’s more research also on different viewpoints than the traditional, does that change how we use or how we look at the term “Grand Tour”?
Anna Geurts
So many fellow researchers ask me: what kind of travel do you research? Is it the Grand Tour? And I say, “no, it’s…it’s all kinds of travel”. And often they then insist and say, “no, you have to choose a specific kind. If it’s not the Grand Tour, maybe it’s Colonial Travel, maybe it’s migration for work reasons”. And I say, “no, I…I want to include them all in the same research”. So I ask one question, for instance, about cleanliness, and I don’t want to distinguish the reason why someone travelled, because I want to know what people shared across this…for instance, Dutch culture with respect to…to cleanliness. Whether you value cleanliness or not throughout your life expresses itself in a journey, but the type of journey may not matter so much for whether you’re…what kind of attachment to cleanliness you express. When you travel for trade reasons and you sit down in your hotel room, you might be equally disgusted as when you travel to find a job and sit down in your newly found bedsit.
Nanette Ashby
As you mentioned before, wealth played a role. Did that also play a role…since we were talking about migrant workers and travel for work reasons, does that also include women or was the role of women still confined to the house and the household?
Anna Geurts
So most women who travelled were unmarried and did not have children and travelled for the same reasons as men to network, educate themselves as specialists, institutions, give lectures, organise politically, find a job as a servant… If they were married, if they had children, they often travelled with their husband and with their children. I’m now forgetting a third group of women who travelled, who were not married, not yet married, and who travelled with their brothers. And that was quite a big group as well. So teenagers, 20 something women who travelled with their brothers, for instance, on his honeymoon. That was not so strange. There would then be three people travelling.
Nanette Ashby
Out of the travel records that you had a look at, most of them were Dutch travellers, and I was wondering how the nationality and the local culture that the people grew up in…if that affected how they experienced or how they presented themselves to the new culture, how that also influenced their choice in experiences and what they wanted to see and what they wanted to get out of the trip?
Anna Geurts
Yes, very much. So I use travel accounts to discover something about non-travel. I use them to discover something about life at home. So when I look at cleanliness on a journey, what I’m really also interested in is whether people had certain preconceptions about cleanliness that were already built up at home. One of my main aims with this research is actually to find what spatial preferences people had at home already, and that really depended on culture. Although I’m finding that Dutch culture, British culture, German, Austrian, French, Swiss culture…there’s a lot of overlap in the 19th century between those cultures. Really a shared, largely international culture when it comes to these everyday expectations. I can imagine that when people start doing cross-cultural comparisons between much bigger regions, where you compare China and Europe, for instance, that we do come across differences. But also there will probably also, again, be very many similarities.
The chapter that I’m writing about cleanliness addresses something that I call “cultures of cleanliness”, and in that chapter, I claim that every culture attaches importance to cleanliness. But what that cleanliness looks like differs between cultures. So in one culture, it might be the epitome of cleanliness to take your shoes off when you enter someone’s home. In a different culture, it might be the epitome of cleanliness to keep them on and not show your socks when you enter someone’s home. So cleanliness can have a different content, but the concept of cleanliness is still valued equally.
Nanette Ashby
That’s also very interesting because that provides diversity between cultures, however, still unites humanity as one.
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah, it’s a good source of potential empathy if people start recognising this.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah. One thing that I’m very curious about was: what were your favourite stories or your favourite diaries that you came across during your research?
Dr Anna Geurts
I like all of them. I have to think a bit. I find this difficult. I feel we have a duty when people make themselves vulnerable across the decades towards us, by us reading their personal writings. We have an obligation to like them and to try and understand each quirkiness that they display. At the same time, all of them show themselves as also a little petty or a little annoying or easily made grumpy or…like everyone! Really I mean, they’re people like all people are, and that shows in these travel accounts. Well, one thing that is always nice to read is when people are a little defiant. And they become the hero of their own story. And then when…when you read that, you’re reading the account exactly as they want it to be read, which is fine, they deserve that as well. We’re always being critical as historians, but it’s also nice to allow them to, you know, be swept along a little bit with their story.
When, for instance, Van Wassenaer tells about visiting Petersburg…she’s a noble lady…she visits the court of the Czars in Petersburg, the entire company takes a walk, but that means going in a coach, going in a carriage, except her. She takes a walk on foot. And then I think it is the czarina mother, if I’m not mistaken, who says, “but my dear, aren’t you exhausted? Are you sure you can walk?” And she says, “yes, I can walk”. She’s clearly very proud and she’s constructing this cultural difference between herself as a sort of hardy Dutch country woman. She has her own estate and she walks in it, and then she’s opposing that to a Russian court life where everyone is a bit lazy and a bit too snobbish, and a bit too rich and a bit silly. Now, of course, that’s an artificial construction that she’s setting up, but it’s nice to see her pride in being able to walk while she sees many people around her who don’t want to enjoy that capability that they have.
Nanette Ashby
And it’s also maybe a little bit of a sense of independence to make choices for yourself and not have to conform to the local culture. There’s a movie in Germany from the 1990s called “Go Trabi Go”. The movie shows a story of a family from Eastern Germany after the wall fell on their first trip out of Eastern Germany, going to West Germany, and then to Italy. The father of the family wanted to recreate the Italian Journey that Goethe described. So during the course of the movie, it keeps being alluded to and he has the book in his hand trying to figure out, “where do I need to drive from here” based on Goethe’s account. And I thought that was a really fun example of how the interest is there, on following people’s footsteps. And I was wondering if that is also a trend in general that people go out and recreate trips from people throughout history and… Have you been inspired to take any trips based on your research or for your research?
Dr Anna Geurts
We got a…one term off free. It was a two years Master’s, so we got one term to go to the archives and I decided to go to archives and libraries in Switzerland. And make a journey because Switzerland was such a special country for Northwestern Europeans in the 19th century. To go to the mountains, the isolated communities, the Protestantism that was seen by many protestant Dutch people as a sort of very pure and strong form of Protestantism, Calvinistic…pure form of Calvinism. I went to Switzerland and it was very special to be in all those locations that I had just been reading about. And so many places were just exactly the same still. And that will be the case in many…many places in the world. Maybe not the big famous places, maybe they have changed, but little corners. And do people do that in general? Recreating entire journeys is done usually on the basis of travel accounts by men. You mentioned Goethe. Many people travelling to Italy have been imitated. People try to do Marco Polo’s journey.
Nanette Ashby
Right, yeah…
Dr Anna Geurts
Or Cook’s journey, or… Those are the journeys that then inspire the present day travel book writers who have their books piled up in the book stores and that draw a lot of customers and listeners to public readings, and that creates TV shows. I’m a bit sad sometimes that it’s always the same journeys that are being replicated again and again while there’s so many interesting journeys that are not looked into.
Nanette Ashby
That’s true. I was just thinking of the Around The World In 80 Days trope or route. Especially also with the tours around Europe, what I’ve found is you don’t usually get enough time in each city or in each place to actually really soak up the culture or take advantage of where you are because you have such limited time that by the time you’ve actually settled, you’re onto the next place.
Dr Anna Geurts
That was the case in the 19th century as well. In the late 19th century, people stayed in the different locations they visited often quite briefly. If they did not get a job there, but if they travelled for different reasons or if they travelled through a place and just stopped for a few days to see the sights because they were then going on to a bigger aim, their stops were quite brief. And in the early 19th century, they were much longer. So people did lose a bit of that opportunity to get to know a place.
Nanette Ashby
Would that also have to do with that the modes of transportation were quicker now? That it would physically take less time to get from one place to the other?
Dr Anna Geurts
You would think that if you travel faster, you have more time…
Nanette Ashby
That’s true.
Dr Anna Geurts
…to be in a place. But, so this is to do with people taking less time to make journeys. So the entire length of journeys has shortened dramatically. Yeah, so our expectations of journeys have changed. We expect to go and our colleagues expect us back in a few weeks. We can’t say I’m going on a journey now for four months. Yeah. And that’s interesting. I don’t…I don’t have a good explanation for that. It’s a big change that…in our culture…cultures that has taken place in Europe, taking less time for things.
Nanette Ashby
In general, has there been increased interest in gender and diversity within research or historical research over the past years? And if so, where do you think that came from? How come there are now opportunities to do this research that weren’t there maybe 10, 20 years ago?
Dr Anna Geurts
Again, I think people affected by, will you say…what terms did you use? “Gender” and…
Nanette Ashby
“Gender and diversity”?
Dr Anna Geurts
“Gender and diversity”. So, all those social axes, those social categorisations, gendering, racialisation, disabling…people have always been interested in it and always been forced to research them and gain knowledge about them if they were negatively affected by them. This is, I think, where a metaphor from physics can actually be used. Action and reaction. As long as there’s been racism, there has been anti-racism and people have been researching that. Whether that receives a place in the academy at universities is a different matter because in order to do that, the people who are already located at the university have to make room. They have to give up some of their space, some of their time, some of their money to the people doing that research, and that has not always been the case. And that comes in waves. And maybe I’m a little bit cynical about the present interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion at big institutions, because that interest was there in the seventies and eighties and then it waned and now it’s back, and now many people are saying it’s new and it’s a first time discovery and that they made that happen. It’s actually those people who have been doing it all along that made it happen. They’ve been doing it for centuries, but it’s that small privileged group of which I am now also a part that sometimes lets people in and sometimes it doesn’t let people in. Sometimes it lets certain themes into their research, sometimes it excludes those themes, and that unfortunately has to do with fashions. Fashionability. Academia has fashions. The media have fashions. Politics have fashions. So I’m always a little bit afraid that this interest will again be gone in 10 years from now. So the big practical question for us is: how can we hold onto it and embed it in our universities so deeply that it can’t just be taken away from us again?
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, that doesn’t fade away.
Dr Anna Geurts
Yeah. And to strengthen it! Because, even now, we’re very far from where we need to be.
Nanette Ashby
Oh, definitely!
Dr Anna Geurts
So this is only a beginning, but we need to hold onto this movement before even the beginning is already taken away again.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, that’s true. Not only does it need to be included in the research itself, but also in the structures of the university to make it even possible. So hopefully that will change, long term.
So when we first talked to each other, we were talking about the situation of the DEI research, and that there was an increase in interest in DEI topics, diversity and inclusion topics, and we wanted to give a little update. Could you share your view on what has happened since we last spoke?
Dr Anna Geurts
So two years ago we were saying that many big organisations and corporations, businesses, governments, were funding, as it’s called, DI related research, education, exhibitions, we talked about how we have to remain vigilant and we never know how long these initiatives or these fundings will still exist. This backlash has come even faster than I already feared two years ago, so Marischka Verbeek called it the feminist winter that we were in, the 1990s and the early 2000s, and it feels like we are already entering now, a feminist winter, and corporations and governments are retreating with their funding, people have to work harder to be allowed and get funding for research and education. Women, people of colour, people with disabilities.
Nanette Ashby
I was also thinking how that is reflected in political decisions and in the taking back of women’s rights when it comes to abortion or other steps, for example in Germany there are laws which are going to limit the support from midwives, so in general support for women being cut through politics, and politics as well has had an influence on education, and budget as well. I’m very sad to hear that’s already been so … so quick.
Dr Anna Geurts
So, on the upside, I’ve just started a new research project pilot in which I researched together with other people one transatlantic journey from Amsterdam to Paramaribo in 1932… a boat journey on a boat with Anton de Kom, famous anti-colonialist writer, and Leoni Kenson, and many other people who worked on that boat, people travelling on that boat. And this is a pilot, this research, but it did get funding and it will be about the post-slavery but still colonial situation in which that journey took place. So I’m hoping to get some first results of that research next year.
Nanette Ashby
Thank you so much, for joining us a second time and updating us on your work, we’re very excited to have you again and I will be very excited to read your book, that’s on the TBR, to read, thank you so much.
Dr Anna Geurts
Thank you you very much, my pleasure.
Nanette Ashby
The one question we ask everybody is: what are you still curious about in your field or broader?
Dr Anna Geurts
I’m curious about everything outside of Europe. I’ve been in Europe too much in my life and in my research, and I want to learn about different places. And I’m now trying to learn more about Suriname. I’m excited that more and more people are now also interested in bodies. As a researcher, not just in a theoretical way, but empirically in trying to think how can we discover more about bodies? Can we do some feeling ourselves as researchers, feeling of our own bodies? Experimental research. We get into the clothes of the past and see how they feel. Can we interview people? Can we ask people? Can we really listen to what people wrote about how they felt? Rather than dismissing that as trivial.
Nanette Ashby
That’s very interesting.
Lastly, do you have any recommendations for further reading or research in the area that we were talking about for listeners who might have the spark of inspiration?
Dr Anna Geurts
This is one of those things in European academia, everyone is always expected to know everything off the top of their head, and if you can’t produce names or dates or information, just like that, you’re not considered a serious academic. Sometimes you have to look something up. This is a book recommended to me by Philomena Essed written by Ellen Samuels, and it’s about Ellen Craft and William Craft’s journey across the United States to freedom and about other case studies. But what Ellen Samuels does is she brings into conversation disability, race, and gender as social constructions and describing how racialisation and gendering, often, in the end, come down to disabling. How prejudice against what is seen as imperfect bodies is often what is underlying discrimination on racial and gender grounds as well. And she does that in the 19th century, 20th century, 21st… Very insightful.
Nanette Ashby
Awesome! Thank you so much for taking the time.
Dr Anna Geurts
You’re welcome.
Nanette Ashby
You can find more information and links to everything we talked about in this episode in the show notes over at raffia-magazine.com, and please let us know what you think over on Instagram @raffia_magazine. If you like this podcast, why don’t you leave us a lovely review on Spotify. Thanks so much for listening and all your support for the podcast. I’ll catch you in the next episode. Bye!
