She was anonymous, known only as Box-car Bertha, a self-proclaimed hobo from the age of 15, who lived through the hard times of the Great Depression.
Not for her exotic distant destinations. Instead, her travels were on the steel threads which wove their way across America – the railroads. Her journey served not as a literary inspiration, but a necessity, a way of life.
She wrote that it was common for many of these women who landed on the great rail network to sell their bodies in exchange for food, transport and lodging. Others pretended to “be saved” so they could live off the soup kitchens set up by various churches.
Maud Parrish worked as a dance-hall girl in Dawson City, Yukon, and Nome, Alaska. When she was growing up (she was born in 1878), she said women had just three choices: they married, became an old maid or “went to hell”.
Telling of the court case at which she sought a divorce, after a brief venture into marriage, she said her mother and father punched her husband, then the opposing lawyers engaged in fisticuffs, before the melee spilled over into the corridors of the court.
“I’ve seen some real battles in dance halls all over the world, but few to beat that one,” she wrote. “Like when two dogs bark and fight and other dogs come and stop, look and listen, and then pile in just for the fun of it.”
Free from the fetters of convention, and armed with just nine pounds of luggage and her banjo, she arrived in the Yukon, where she travelled 800km to Dawson city on a dog sledge.
At the dance hall she made a veritable fortune: dancing all night, at two dollars a dance, for a dance of a minute (the girl got half) plus fifty cents on every drink they drank with patrons – measured out in gold dust. As the dance hall was where most disputes between miners were sorted out, often with a shooting, her life was never dull.
The turn of the century saw her operating a gambling house in Beijing, and she claimed to have gone around the world 16 times.
Vivienne de Watteville went on safari with her father in Kenya, and when he was mauled and killed by a lion, she took command of the expedition.
How about Freya Stark, who lived to the ripe old age of 100, became an expert in Arabic dialects, and was employed as a southern Arabia expert by the British Ministry of Information.
Travelling extensively in places such as Turkey, China, Afghanistan and Nepal, she eventually was named Dame of the British Empire in 1972.
While Rebecca West was a writer of novels and history, she received her greatest praise, we are told, for her insight into the Balkans and its potential for conflict. One of the places she wrote about, the Muslim town of Mostar, eventually became renowned for the extensive bombing during the Bosnian war.
Emily Carr must have raised many eyebrows
when she wheeled a perambulator full of dogs, cats and a monkey down the streets of Victoria, her home town in Canada.
Missionaries Mildred Cable and Francesca French crossed and recrossed the Gobi Desert five times in 15 years between 1926 and 1941. They gave accounts of what it was like to travel by starlight, the voices that called from the dunes and which you had to ignore (the locals believed those who listened were lured to their deaths), the constant mirages, and of surviving sand storms.
The two travelled to many other countries. Their final journey to South America was when Mildred was 72, Francesca 79 and her sister, Evangeline French, 81.
While fellow aviators Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson also wrote books about their flights, Beryl Markham (the first woman pilot to cross the Atlantic from East to West) was the only one singled out by Ernest Hemingway for her literary style, though some believe she was not the real author of her book.
Returning to Africa, she trained race horses; eight of them ended up winning the prestigious Kenya Derby. A near-forgotten recluse, who drank too much, she maintained she was the first person to scout for elephants by plane.
She also went on expeditions with Bror Blixen-Finecke, the former husband of Isak Dinesen of Out of Africa fame.
Ella Maillart lived with Kirghiz and Kazakh tribesmen in the 1930s; Rose Macaulay, who wrote about her travels by automobile along the coast of Spain in 1948, is said to have inspired thousands to take up that mode of travel; while Margaret Mead’s studies of adolescent and sexual behaviour among people living in the South Pacific made her one of the best-known anthropologists of the 20th century.
Renegade Emily Hahn was the first woman to graduate with a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin. She worked with the Red Cross in the then Belgian Congo; was a newspaper correspondent; and taught English in China.
Travelling with her husband, Eleanor Clark went into the Sahara to climb the Hoggar mountains of southern Algeria, joining a caravan to Tamanrasset, where the Touareg nomads gave her the name of Tamrart – meaning dominant female.
Coming to some of the more modern women travellers, Dervla Murphy trekked by mule in Ethiopia; cycled through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India; worked with Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal; and travelled in South America, Madagascar, Cameroon and Siberia.
To visit the shrine of Qum in Iran, a place forbidden to women, Sarah Hobson disguised herself as a man, suffering the discomfort of an elastic girdle around her chest.
While travelling 3 200km up the Congo River, Helen Winternitz learned LIngala, then Amharic in Ethiopia and Swahili in East Africa. She survived the Intifada while living for two years in a small Palestinian village, by speaking Arabic.
Leila Philip believed one needed to “fall into the ways of a country” as soon as possible to travel and write with insight. So, while studying the potter’s craft in Japan, she harvested rice with women and focused on recording customs normally hidden from Western view.
Many of these travellers had a beautiful turn of phrase – as Isabella Bird’s description of her last day in the Rockies shows: “Yesterday morning the mercury was 20 degrees below zero. The curious phenomenon called frost-fall was occurring in which, whatever moisture may exist in the air, somehow aggregates into feather and fern-leaves, the loveliest of creations, only seen in rarefied air and intense cold.
“The air was filled with diamond sparks quite intangible...”
With their breathtaking vision of a greater world out there to be explored, these women were indefatigable.
They don’t make them like that any more. - Sunday Tribune