Travel as Political Practice and Economic Strategy

This chapter deals with travel and travel writing and posits that travel was an essential practice for the development of social and political movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Examining Käthe Schirmacher’s travels on her lecture tours and how she organised them, the chapter illustrates the close entanglement of political practice and economic strategy and therefore argues for an analytical perspective that includes both aspects. The chapter also looks at examples of Schirmacher’s travel writing. It analyses how she constructed cultural differences, and thus allows a more nuanced view of her varying uses of the term ‘civilisation’, which also plays an important role in her writing on women’s movements in a global context.