Practices, Experiences, and Material Culture of Central European Female Leisure Travel(lers), 1880-1914.
What was it like to travel as a woman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Focusing on leisure travel by train, ship, and car and paying specific attention to material conditions, I explore the ways in which gender, class status, age, marital status, and travel companionship shaped the tourist practices and experiences of German-speaking Central European women in the years 1880-1914. In addition, I seek to investigate how the growing opportunities for leisure travel impacted women’s everyday lives and societal roles and, in turn, how women’s evolving travel practices shaped the conditions and expectations of tourism.

How, for instance, did women prepare and pack for a journey? Did they take safety measures when travelling in a sleeping car? What difficulties may have arisen when they spontaneously tried to find a hotel room at night? Under what circumstances did female tourists take meals or visit cultural sites alone, and when did they do so with a companion? And how did they deal with health and hygiene issues? Did they adopt specific dressing habits or carry certain medicines or devices with them? Did they take travel practices ‘back home’?

Pursuing a bottom-up perspective, I base my research first on the diaries of women travellers and then reconstruct the context around their self-expressed experiences, using sources such as etiquette and guidebooks, advertising booklets, ship, train, and hotel plans, visual sources such as personal photograph albums and print advertisements, as well as material sources such as travel dress and hygiene kits.