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This chapter discusses how gender determined one’s ability to be mobile and to access specific spaces in the Edo period. Political discourse mapped the spaces of travel by intersecting the parallels of gender with the meridians of status, devoting great attention to the distinction between male and female travelers, between individuals of high or low standing, between active players and simple pawns in the economy, and between involved or relatively disengaged members of society. Along the roads, however, some of these theoretical distinctions became less clear, or were defined differently. Where political necessities drew lines of separation, actual practice blurred them; where administrators were blind to differences, common sense distinguished them clearly.

This chapter focuses on how malleable spaces of travel sustained many women’s attempts to redefine their personas. Along the road, women could subtly call into question some of the parameters by which their lives and roles were delineated and rearrange them along different trajectories in the pages of their memoirs. However, before they could accomplish this, they needed to find a way to detach themselves from the spaces they had been permanently assigned. This was no easy task for both legal codes and social expectations tended to either confine women or to regulate their movements meticulously. To these enduring attempts to micromanage their movements, many female travelers responded with subterfuge.

This chapter looks at women travelers in China between the late 1870s and the early 1920s. It specifically determines a first generation of women's travel in China exemplified in Isabella Bird's The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) and Constance Gordon Cumming's Wanderings in China (1888). It also poses the question of whether their journeys served as more prescriptive itineraries for later women travelers and, in fact, established the frameworks of what is called a Grand Tour of China. It starts by reviewing Bird's and Cumming's travel routes. It then introduces Eliza Scidmore's travel guide and finally moves into a discussion of how the second generation of female travelers describes the most prominent travel destination on their Grand Tour of China — the capital Beijing — between 1900 and 1924. The accounts of pioneering British women led to the more systematic travel itineraries of succeeding American women. Traveling educated not only the mind but also the senses and feelings, as the recurring encounters with Chinese women show.