Middle Eastern women’s travel writing began only around 1900

Evidence

Until fairly recently, they were all Western ladies. Before the beginnings of modernization, women from the Middle East did occasionally travel to Europe, as part of the household of a diplomatic, commercial, or other traveler, but for the most part they had neither the opportunity to receive impresssions nor the education to express and record them. This began to change at the turn of the twentieth century, when for the first time literate Muslim ladies from the Middle East were able to travel to Europe, establish communication, and write about their experiences and impressions. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 782

Categorization

• XREF: Explains why the gaze in travel accounts was one-directional (West-on-East) until the twentieth century — knowledge production asymmetry grounded in access to education and travel; corroborates Said’s point about who got to represent whom.