27/04/2025
WOMEN FORGOTTEN BY HISTORY
TRAVELLERS EDITION
As a passionate, adventurous traveller, I am constantly wondering “why?” while I tell my stories with excitement. I listen to people telling me that I should not go somewhere because it is too dangerous for women, especially for a woman alone. I noticed that we grow up with way too many male examples of the greatest travellers of history. Since primary school, everyone gets to know about the stories of explorers like Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, Marco Polo, and so many more. I had to dig up some stories of adventurous female explorers of the past because I felt the need to have more of women's perspectives of the world. I want to bring up some stories from courageous women who fought for their passion, regardless of the closed-minded society they were born in, wherein they did not have any easy access to formal education and often lived with no economic independence.
• Eva Mameli Calvino: Italian botanist and naturalist, living between Italy and Cuba
Born in 1886 in Sassari (Sardinia), she moved to the University of Pavia, Lombardia, in northern Italy. She was the first woman to obtain a teaching qualification in botany at an Italian university. She was engaged in challenges, both scientific and social, and she also got the silver medal from the Italian Red Cross and the bronze medal for civil valor from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. She had 4 siblings, and her love for science was inspired by the chemistry studies of her eldest brother, Efisio, 11 years older than Eva. She decided to study at “Liceo”, which was traditionally reserved for male students. After graduating, she enrolled in bachelors in math at the University of Cagliari, and then moved to Pavia, where her brother Efisio was teaching chemistry at the University there. Eva started to work at the cryptogamic lab of the university where she spent hours at the microscope, studying the cellular structure of algae and moss. In 1907 at 21, she got a degree in botany. Eva spent the days in the lab, researching until 1914, when during the First World, she became a nurse and treated injured soldiers in the hospital. In 1915 at 29, she became a lecturer in botany at Pavia University and split her life between university and the hospital. In 1920, after an invitation from her colleague and future husband Mario Calvino, she moved to Cuba to work as Head of the Botany Department of the Agricultural Experiment Station.
Eva was still engaged in social activities especially for campesinos (farmer of Cuba). She founded a school for kids and taught them the basics of growing crops and advanced courses for farming. She also founded a magazine for farmers to help them to answer their questions. Always driven by her passion for science, she traveled around Cuba to visit botanic gardens or people within the scientific community. In 1923, she travelled to Brazil when she was 7 months pregnant to study the biggest Yucca crop and study the growth phases and machine for its treatment.
In 1925 she came back to Italy with her family and moved to Sanremo, Liguria. She was vice director of the station and got a teaching position in botanics at the University of Cagliari. She was the first woman to have 2 academic positions, all the while living between Sardinia and the northeast of Italy, with 2-year-old children and her second pregnancy going on. She found 2 journals with her husband Mario, before the dark years and the Second World War. In 1951, Eva lost her husband. She kept living with passion until her death, in Sanremo, at the age of 92.
• Mary Henrietta Kingsley: British writer and traveller, anthropologist and ethnographer, passionate of African studies.
Born in 1862 in London, Mary travelled a lot in West Africa and wrote books about her experiences. Her father, George Kingsley was a traveller and writer as well, and his experience was influential to Mary. She in fact had access to his library where she studied. She had no access to formal education because, for a woman of that time, it was not considered necessary. Her brother Charley was a student at Christ’s College in Cambridge, consequently allowings Mary to get academic connections. George Kingsley’s experiences in North America also influenced Mary’s opinions about colonialism and its brutality, which she brings into her African studies. Mary also criticised the Christian missionaries and their opera in Africa, oppressing the pre-existing culture and not bringing actual benefits. In her early 30s, Mary had to take care of her sick parents and once they passed away, with the family's inheritance and the freedom from responsibility, she started travelling.
Mary decided to embark on a journey to West Africa as a solo woman because all the other female passengers were wives of missionaries or government officials. In 1993, she arrived in Sierra Leone, and then travelled to Angola. Her second travel to Africa in 1994 was in Gabon and Cameroon. Her travel experience was impressive: she stayed with locals, learned from them, studied the cannibal people, canoed up the Ogoouè river, and climbed 4,040m in Mount Cameroon. Mary often attempted to uncover paths and with the hopeful result of being the first European to explore some station. This was dangerous, but she was prepared to deal with injuries and jungle maladies because she had prepared as a nurse.
Mary travelled to Cape Town in 1900, after the outbreak of the Second Boer War, where she volunteered as a nurse. She started to get typhoid symptoms and died a few months later. She was buried at sea as she wished.
BOOKS:
Travels in West Africa, Congo Francais, Corsico and Cameroons (1897)
West African Studies (1899)
The Story of West Africa, in The Story of the Empire Series (1900)
• Isabella Bird: British writer, photographer and explorer, first woman to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Born in 1831, in Boroughbridge (North Yorkshire, England). As the daughter of a Reverend, Isabella moved around a lot during her childhood, and she did not have any formal education, as it was usual for women of that time. Isabella became a great reader. Isabelle suffered from health issues since her childhood and because of those complications, her doctor suggested she go for a sea voyage, so she travelled to North America. Isabella left in 1854, at 23 years old, and spent some time between the United States and Canada, visiting some relatives that moved there. When she came back to England she published her first book The Englishwoman in America anonymously. She travelled for the rest of her life: in 1872 she went to Australia, then Hawaii, then to Colorado and travelled by horse in the Rocky Mountains. Isabella kept publishing books of her adventures along with articles in different magazines, which often included letters from her travels to her sister Henrietta. Isabella came back to England to leave again for Asia. In 1878, she travelled to Japan, China, Korea; Vietnam; Singapore and Malaya. Back in England again, Isabella dealt with Henrietta's funeral in 1880, and in 1881, she married Henrietta’s doctor, John Bishop. Isabella lost her husband in 1886, and with the inheritance she decided to study medicine and travel as a missionary in order to make out more from her travels. Isabella, a widow and nearly 60 years old, left England again for India, where she founded the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinagar (Kashmir). Isabelle kept travelling in her 60s in Asia: she went to Ladak, on the border with Tibet, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Armenia, and Turkey. In 1897, Isabelle went to China and travelled up the Yangtze, the longest river of Eurasia, and up the Han River, in Korea. Her last travel was to Morocco, in 1900. Isabelle died of illness at 72 years old in her home in Edinburgh, a few months after she came back from Morocco.
BOOKS:
The Englishwoman in America (1856)
The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875)
Australia Felix: impressions of Victoria and Melbourne (1877)
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879)
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1879)
Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan. Vol 1 (1891)
Among the Tibetans (1894)
Korea and her Neighbours (1898)
Chinese Pictures: Notes on photographs made in China (1900)
Notes on Morocco (1901)
• Elizabeth Jane Cochran aka Nelly Bly: American journalist and traveller
Born in 1864 in Burrell (Pennsylvania). Elizabeth had 14 siblings from the two marriages of her father, who she lost when she was 6 years old. When she was 15, she enrolled at Indiana Normal School but had to drop out after one term because of financial reasons. At 16, she moved with her mother to Pittsburgh where she got involved in working for the local newspaper, Pittsburgh Dispatch. She came across an article called “what girls are good for” and she decided to write a response to its statements that said girls are just good for giving birth to children and keeping the house. The editor was impressed by her writing and wanted to identify the author as she wrote under the pseudonym of “Lonely Orphan Girl”. Elizabeth got the opportunity to write an article for the newspaper and many others followed. In her early writings, Elizabeth focused on women's conditions and social positions, stating that not all women would marry, women needed to get better jobs (The Girl Puzzle), how divorce affected women (Mad Marriages), and the lives of working women in the factory. Because of that, the Pittsburgh Dispatch received a complaint from the factory owner so Elisabeth was assigned to write about fashion and gardening, which of course didn’t make her satisfied. At 21, she decided to travel to Mexico as a reporter for 6 months, where she criticized the Mexican government and the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, and was threatened with her arrest so she had to go back to the US.
In 1887, at 23, she left Pittsburgh and went to New York to search for better opportunities than writing about art and theatre. Elizabeth faced a lot of rejection because no one wanted to hire women, but she managed to take an undercover assignment from New York World newspaper thanks to Joseph Pulitzer. She was the pioneer of investigative journalism: by reporting undercover of the poor situation of a mental institution. She faked a mental struggle and got locked in The New York City Mental Health Hospital on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) and reported how women were treated. When she got out, she published an article and after that forced the hospital to adopt reforms.
She was a great traveller. In 1888 she attempted to travel around the world in 72 days, emulating the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. She travelled mainly alone for 40,070 kilometres, across the Atlantic to reach Europe, then England, France, Brindisi in southern Italy, Suez Canal, headed to Sri Lanka, Penang in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, to cross the Pacific and arrived in San Francisco and cross the US by train to New York again.
Elizabeth wrote novels along with her articles but left journalism after her marriage at 31, to a manufacturer, Robert Seaman. She took over her husband’s company after his death, becoming one of the leading women industrialists in the United States. After the bankruptcy of the company, she came back to the journalism scene, writing about woman suffrage in 1913 and the first woman to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria during the First World War.
She died of pneumonia at 57, in New York.
BOOKS:
Ten Days in a Mad House (1887)
Six months in Mexico (1888)
The Mystery of Central Park (1889)
Nelie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-two Days (1890)
• Alexandra David-Neel: French explorer, writer, opera singer, oriental philosophies and Buddhist student.
Born in 1868 in Saint-Mandé (Île-de-France), she was the first Western woman to travel to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet and the residence of Dalai Lama, whose entrance was forbidden to foreigners.
In 1886, at only 18 years old, she left her parents' home to travel on a bike to Spain. She went to the north of France and then moved to London to study oriental philosophies and English. In Paris, she also studied Tibetan Buddhism and oriental languages at the Sorbonne University, and joined secret societies like Massoneria, as well as feminist and anarchy movements. She travelled across India and fell in love with meditation techniques. Due to economic reasons, she started to travel the world as an opera singer, and she was the first woman to Hanoi Opera, Vietnam. She then moved to Tunisia, in North Africa, to be the artistic director of the Tunisian capital theatre. There she met a French man, whom she got married to. But she was a passionate woman, and married life was tightening her spirit, so she kept travelling the world in agreement with her husband, who later died in 1941. She lived like a hermit in Himalaya from 1914 to 1916, with a Tibetan monk. In 1916 she was in Tibet and because of the First World War, she had to go to Japan. She then went to China to travel to Lhasa, on foot and dressed like a Tibetan. In 1937 she came back to Cina, only to be stuck again in Asia because of the second world war. She came back to Europe in 1946. Alexandra moved to Provance and died in 1969, at 101 years old.
BOOKS:
“My Journey to Lhasa: the Classic story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in entering the Forbidden City” (1927)
Here are some women I admire immensely, and I could have written about hundreds of other women who left a significant mark in history, but somehow, they ended up lying in the shade. I appreciate the courage, strength, intelligence love and passion they put into everything they did, for themselves, for their family and for the people they met. They deserve a place in the spotlight of history, not to be forgotten because they were not just women with different and anomalous interests.
