ABSTRACT
Travelers were quite certain that a woman's primary relationship to food was as its producer. Michel Chevalier characterized the interior as determined to "nail women to the kitchen and the nursery from the day of their marriage to the day of their death," and he saw in it no compensation for women. From early on in the interior, travelers noticed the custom, foreign to them, "of the wife not sitting down to table until her husband and the strangers have finished their meal," as Fortescue Cuming observed in 1809. Travelers observed physical gender division most fully on the steamboats and trains, at the large hotels, and at certain large social events. All travelers agreed that women, even women alone, could travel anywhere in America in perfect safety; some women travelers were warned of certain dangers of travel, but they neither articulated these dangers nor experienced them.
