The Spectacular Traveling Woman
Australian and Canadian Visions of Women, Modernity, and Mobility between the Wars
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Abstract
This article applies recent scholarship concerned with transatlantic mobility and print cultures to a comparative study of images of transpacific travel for women during the interwar period. During the 1920s and 1930s female travelers splashed spectacularly across the pages of mainstream, popular magazines produced in America, Britain, and the wider Anglophone world. Focusing on two magazines that launched in this era, The Australian Woman’s Mirror (1924–1961) and Chatelaine (1928–), this article explores Australian and Canadian fictional portrayals of the traveling woman of the interwar years to examine the ways in which the mobility of the modern girl became a screen for anxieties and fantasies of these two national print imaginaries. By paying attention to the different portrayals of female mobility through the Pacific from both sides of the ocean, this article also considers the intersection between actual travel, ideas about travel, and notions of gendered social mobility.
Contributor Notes
Sarah Galletly is the Margaret and Colin Roderick Postdoctoral Research Fellow at James Cook University, Australia. Her PhD, completed at the University of Strathclyde, focused on representations of women’s work in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Canadian fiction. Her current research explores the early twentieth-century mass-market periodical cultures of Canada and Australia, with a particular focus on the short fiction career of L. M. Montgomery. She is collaborating with Victoria Kuttainen and Susann Liebich on “The Transported Imagination” (www.transportedimagination.com), a research project exploring representations of overseas travel and internationalism in Australian interwar magazines. E-mail: sarah.galletly@jcu.edu.au