Gender, Science, and Authority in Women's Travel Writing by Michelle Medeiros is a remarkable book that examines the fundamental work of women travelers in scientific discourses and circles through their alternate visibility as transatlantic subjects. The book moreover unveils important archival material that adds to our knowledge of their role in complex social networks. An important contribution to our understanding of science in the nineteenth century.

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Gender, Science and Authority in Women's Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History is a thickly layered study of authority, gender and the discourse of natural history in travel narratives penned by women in the nineteenth century. The book examines the writings of four women: the British botanist Maria Graham, the Cuban-Spanish author Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, the Brazilian writer and educator Nisia Floresta, and the AmericaN naturalist Doris Cochran. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the role women played in the construction of scientific knowledge and of the strategies employed by them to gain access into this male dominated field.

Hispania

Medeiros convincingly argues that the transatlantic traveling women discussed in this book were brave and strategic iconoclasts. By crossing geographical borders with their bodies, these women in turn broke social boundaries with their writing, opening up new textual and intellectual territories for other women to engage in debates about science, education, religion, and the natural world. Medeiros shows, too, how these writers powerfully spoke back to patriarchal, Eurocentric scientific writing practices that constructed the Americas as primitive and empty, and put both women and the Americas on the world stage as important producers of culture. That they did all this while appearing to adhere to social mores of their times makes their achievement all the more remarkable.

Erika Behrisch Elce, Royal Military College of Canada

At last, we have a major contribution to the literature on women travelers--the focus of which is Hispanic women, who have too often been absent from other texts. It will certainly appear on my syllabi.

Felicia Campbell, Editor of Popular Culture Review

Michelle Medeiros’s Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing makes a landmark contribution to 19th- and 20th-century Latin American literary and cultural studies. Based on impressive archival research and sharp readings of primary and secondary works, Medeiros shows how the language of science and natural history provided a vocabulary, methodology, and critical perspective for women travelers who moved in heterogeneous, international circles. By advancing the concept of a “transatlantic subjectivity,” Medeiros broadens our understanding of the multiple roles privileged and nonprivileged women travelers played and the diverse spaces in which they forged the authority to write and debate on topics of natural history. With this book, Medeiros brings to light exciting insights into the social networks these women developed, enriching the burgeoning fields of the history of women in science and Latin American studies.

Marcia C. Stephenson, Purdue University