“Exceedingly Neat and Clean”: Household Management in North Atlantic Women’s Travel Writings, 1800–1850 (Fall 2018)

Abstract

Women who wrote amidst their travels in the Caribbean and Mexico in the early nineteenth century were uncommon. Yet there they were, traveling and contributing through their actions and words to colonial and imperial processes, exercised through their daily relationships in local environments. The purpose of this article is to explore one theme in their private writings—the way they established their transient homes—and in doing so, consider the connection between their travels and colonial hierarchies. Household management, defined broadly as those activities related to establishing and maintaining the domestic space, provides a helpful window through which to compare traveling women’s experiences. I argue that the traveling women enacted household management in similar ways, contributing to the crossroads of existing hierarchies based on race and class. Using a historian’s perspective informed by feminist and transatlantic approaches, this project centers the private writings of four North Atlantic women, Maria Nugent, Margaret Curson, Frances Calderón de la Barca, and Susan Shelby Magoffin, who each traveled in the Caribbean and/or Mexico in the early nineteenth century. Examining household management as portrayed in the traveling women’s private writings highlights the locational specificities that gave power to—and limited the power of—a ubiquitous, but never universal, colonial white womanhood in the Americas.