A WOMANS TREK - WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES GENDER MAKE

When she introduces her 1907 narrative, A Woman's Trek from the Cape to Cairo as "a book, written from a woman's point of view, minus big game romances, and the usual exaggerations incidental to all things African," Mary Hall raises a question central to feminist studies of empire: in the relation of Europeans to empire, what difference does gender make? While there is little difference in the explicit statements about empire in African travel narratives by men and women at the height of the imperial period, a comparison of the representations of the relationship between traveler and Africans-the relationship between Self and Other that parallels empire on a personal scale-in the Cape-to-Cairo narratives of Mary Hall and her two closest male contemporaries reveals differences that are directly tied to gender. © 1990.