Cosmopolitanism, colonial shopping, and the servant problem: nurse Ida E. Cliffe’s travels in wartime India

Ida E. Cliffe was posted in India as a nurse during the First World War. In a travel memoir published sixty years later, she captures her extensive travels across wartime colonial India. Her travel diary combines two distinct positions – that of the woman-coloniser recording her travel in the colonies, and that of the nurse in a war-zone. It focuses on the British coloniser’s home-life in India, the picturesque landscape of the country, the cosmopolitanism of its people, and its recent history. This article explores the problematic nuances in Cliffe’s celebration of colonial cosmopolitanism, her shopping for colonial artefacts and her appreciation of the picturesque embedded within the subtext of pride in British imperialism. It demonstrates not only the complexities in the figure of the female imperial traveller, but also the heteroglossia in the genre of women’s travel writing

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

As part of GPC’s 25-year anniversary celebrations, this article explores possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers. Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published in the period from around 2000 onwards and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home, from landscapes and buildings to personal possessions like clothes and letters. Doing so is a deliberate act intended both to demonstrate the liveliness of feminist historical geographies broadly conceived and to counter hierarchical readings of space, society and history with their inherent danger of privileging the public over the private, and the exceptional over the everyday and mundane