ABSTRACT
The differences between the women and their experiences of indigenous peoples point to an expectation of differences in the ways that they portrayed these encounters, and this is certainly the case. However, on a few occasions, white women travellers challenged some of the prevailing views pertaining to race and racial theory. Individual circumstances, class and gender relations all influenced the representations by white women. Barnes Stevenson argues that women travellers often displayed a sympathy for, and understanding of, peoples whose skin colour distinguished them, as these women often found themselves distinguished as ‘other’ in Britain on the basis of gender. The views of these women were often influenced by powerful racial theories in Britain, and as these theories evolved and changed, so the views of women travelling at different times varied and contrasted. Erroneous theories of polygenesis allowed her to ‘look at Africa on its own terms, without comparison and judgement’.
