Private and Public Space in the Travelogues of Ḥāǧǧiye Ḫānum ʿAlaviyyeh Kermānī (1882) and Sakīneh Sulṭān Vaqār ad-Douleh (1900)

This paper deals with the complex dynamics of social class and gender and how they affected women’s mobility and opportunities for action in Qajar society within private and public spheres. It also raises the question of concepts of space which will be approached by a focus on women on the road: How was private and public space perceived? Considering the travel narration, the matter of female authorship in the context of 19th-century Iran is important: Who had the authority to write and how was it obtained? In which “spaces” were women allowed to write? For which kind of audience did women write their texts – “private” or “public“ readership? Ultimately, how far did a female authored text transgress the border of public and private spaces – both regarding readership and the act of writing itself? These questions will be examined based on two Hajj-pilgrimage reports written by Qajar women: the first report is the account of Ḥāǧǧiye Ḫānum ʿAlaviyyeh Kermānī (1882), a woman from a royal provincial family in Kerman, with ties to the court in Tehran. The second case is that of the travel narrative of Sakīneh Sulṭān Vaqār ad-Douleh (1900), who was one of the wives of Nāṣer ad-Dīn Shāh.
Recent scholarship increasingly considers the diversity of Qajar women’s identities (along religion, ethnicity, age, social class etc.) and the ways how this defined women’s worlds. However, I suggest that important nuances within allegedly one and the same social group are still neglected. Revealing how these nuances are relevant in understanding women’s lives and particularly women’s modes of travelling will be the purpose of comparing the two travel accounts. Basic information such as the origin of the author/traveller, family and marriage ties, being part of networks, and living at the centre or the periphery provide important insight. It will be demonstrated, that these small differences of social status and the resulting differences in behaviour on the road affected the opportunities of action within the public and private sphere. Being on the road created a unique situation for women given the circumstances of mobility and physical space such as accommodation and means of transportation.