Public Health and Safety in Hawaii

For years, Europeans were morbidly fascinated by accounts of cannibalism in the Pacific. Rumors circulated that Captain Cook's body was eaten by cannibals in the Sandwich Islands. Even Melville wrote of cannibalism in Typee (1846). Although many contemporary scholars agree that Hawaiians did not practice cannibalism, nineteenth-century Europeans believed Pacific Islanders actively practiced cannibalism and were, therefore, “savages” (Kawaharada). The Pacific was considered a wild and dangerous place for white Europeans. More pressing health and safety issues, however, were happening in the islands which were annihilating the native population – diseases brought to the islands by Europeans. By 1865, the Hawaiian Islands had experienced deadly outbreaks of: measles, smallpox, pertussis, cholera, and influenza. Sailors, explorers, traders, and whalers crossing the Pacific helped spread these diseases to the islanders in addition to venereal diseases and tuberculosis. Leprosy, perhaps the most infamous epidemic in Hawaiian history, arrived in the islands sometime in the early 1800s. By the 1850s and 1860s, leprosy cases were becoming a dominant concern on the islands (Inglis 103).

Perhaps to answer questions Bird's reading audience may have had about public health and safety in Hawaii following these epidemics, Bird addresses the mental and physical state of native Hawaiians. In her text, she finds Hawaiians are not, contrary to missionary reports, savages nor are they cannibals. They are not identical to Fijians, and most importantly, native Hawaiians do not worship idols. The Hawaiians, she reports, are “on the whole a quiet, courteous, orderly, harmless, Christian community” (Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago 3). To demonstrate to her British audience that Hawaii is indeed civilized, she reports on the Hawaiian political system. Early in her travel narrative, Bird describes the civilized order of the Hawaiian kingdom. She writes:

Although modern scholars contest missionaries’ interference in native cultures, Bird, a product of her time, views the missionary enterprise as a largely positive practice. She believed missionaries and church members – if they were not corrupt – were bringing enlightenment to the world (Bird, The Aspects of Religion in the United States of America 116, 187). Bird credits missionaries with bringing the Bible, education, and political systems to Hawaiians. She acknowledges missionaries taught Hawaiians how to read and later, because of their new found Christian education, Hawaiians began to challenge ancient, oppressive feudal customs. Bird lays this foundation as if to prove to her readers that Hawaiians are civilized and respectable; all of this, she notes, happened in less than a generation (Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, 1881 ed., 67). Yet she finds Hawaiians have a carefree, liberal, happy lifestyle that encourages good health.

Bird's fondness for native Hawaiian culture is markedly different from many Victorian male travelers’ attitudes toward Pacific Islanders. Bird does not view Hawaiians as people for conquest; rather she hopes their natural, joyful lifestyle might influence rigid Victorian attitudes toward women and leisure. Bird was writing within a counter-discourse articulated by other women travelers – women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), Constance Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924), and later Mary Kingsley (1862–1900). In her counter-discourse, Bird suggests the English might learn how to live healthy, pure lives if only they adopt some Hawaiian attitudes. Bird's travel narrative also differs markedly from male travel narratives because of her interest in participating in native cultural activities and her desire to learn. James Buzard, in Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (2005), discusses the relevance of the term “culture.” Buzard states, “‘culture’ had been accused of functioning as an ‘essential tool for making other,’ corralling subjugated peoples into more readily governable thought-packets and giving the differences, separations, and inequities among groups of people ‘the specious air of the self-evident’” (Buzard 3). Buzard credits George W. Stocking, Jr. as proving that “mainstream Victorian anthropology, massively invested in the project of constructing one single narrative about the evolution of human social forms and technologies, was committed to dealing with levels of human Culture – frequently written with a capital C – from primitive to advanced, and not with separate, relatively autonomous ‘cultures,’ differently evolved under different environmental conditions” (Buzard 6). White nineteenth-century missionaries subscribed to such cultural theory as they attempted to bring enlightened Christianity to the dark races, including the indigenous peoples of Hawaii. Isabella Bird's Hawaiian travel narrative challenges pervasive nineteenth-century anthropological theories about an inherent cultural hierarchy among the world's peoples. She refutes the Victorian idea of the “savage,” that “state of human society apparently so unconstrained by morality or law that it could even be said to lie outside the reach or below the line of Culture altogether” (Buzard 6). Hawaiians, for Bird, certainly have a different approach to living because of environmental factors, some of which come as a shock to her Victorian sensibilities. But, for the most part, Bird is sympathetic towards Hawaiians and credits the differences in their attitudes and practices as a positive result of their landscape and climate, not as a result of their skin color, heathenism, or vice.

Bird's travel text is critical to nineteenth-century studies because of her experience with what Mary Louise Pratt classifies as the “contact zone,” the point of transculturation. The contact zone, according to Pratt, is the social space where “cultures meet and clash.” Cultural boundaries, including stereotypes, can be challenged or even broken in the contact zone. But the exchange or interaction can be uneven (Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone” 34). Negotiating the competing practices of European imperialism and Hawaiian culture, Bird reflects on imperialist ideologies, specifically what whites think they know about Hawaiians and what Bird actually learns when she lives there for six months. Her experience, though not without some Victorian British bias, is a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of an indigenous culture.

The Early Christian Missionaries in the Sandwich Islands

The early missionaries in Hawaii recorded an entirely different experience with indigenous peoples than Bird did. Approximately fifty years before Bird's visit, missionaries settled in Hawaii (Grimshaw xi). In Ephraim Eveleth's History of the Sandwich Islands with an Account of the American Mission Established there in 1820, Eveleth describes the situation of native islanders during the missionaries’ early contact. Eveleth states, “From the death of Captain Cook, until the introduction of Christianity, in the year 1820, there was going on in the islands a regular deterioration in character, and an aggravation in vice and misery” (Eveleth 78). In Eveleth's opinion (among others), divine intervention, in the form of Christian missionaries was the only way to end the misery of the islanders and advance civilization. It is interesting to note that Bird does not see vice and misery in Hawaiians themselves, rather she finds vice and misery were brought to the islands by foreign “mean whites,” the “riff- raff of the Pacific” (Bird, Six Months, 1881 ed., 149).

Since the 1820s, the whaling industry brought Westerners to Hawaii. White merchants from Britain and America had established a flourishing triangular trade among themselves, Hawaii, and China. American merchants took advantage of Hawaii's natural resources through trade and displaced their British competition. American Protestant missionaries were not welcomed in the Sandwich Islands by the existing white merchants and whalers. Local British traders feared that the American missionary presence would only strengthen the American hold on trade in the region. They unsuccessfully tried to persuade King Kamehameha II to block the American missionaries’ entry. The action failed and American Protestants set about their conversion of the Hawaiian Islands (Kashay 282–83).

By the mid-1820s, British merchants criticized the missionaries for stealing their laborers. Merchants moaned that “missionaries discouraged native industry” because natives attended weekly church services, weekly prayer services, even school, all activities which took thousands of workers out of the fields (Kashay 286). The 1820s and 1830s saw great turmoil between missionaries and merchants; missionaries at first aligned themselves with the Hawaiian government and they did not support foreign involvement in Hawaiian rule. Alliances shifted, however, by the 1830s, when missionaries became involved in commercial agriculture. Missionaries and merchants began to own land in Hawaii (Grimshaw 182–83). Because of their vast land holdings, missionaries and merchants became the imperial force that would conquer Hawaii and erode native Hawaiian rights (Kashay 297–98).

The first contingent of the American Board of Commissioners For Foreign Missions (ABCFM) supported missionaries who left for Hawaii in 1819. The secretary of the ABCFM, Dr. Samuel Worcester, delivered official instructions to the group. He told them they would find heathens existing “in the rudest state of uncultured man” (Grimshaw 25). Their duty was to bring true happiness, dignity, and immortality through the Christian Bible. He continued, “You are to aim at nothing short of covering those islands with fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings, and schools, and churches; of raising up the whole people to an elevated state of Christian civilization” (Grimshaw 25). As helpmates of their husbands, women had an important role, to responsibly educate and convert native women and children (Zwiep). As missionary records show, it was not always an easy task. One missionary, Mr. Stewart, records in his journal: “A first sight of these wretched creatures was almost overwhelming. Their naked figures and wild expression of countenance, their black hair streaming in the wind as they hurried the canoe over the water, with all the eager action and muscular power of savages” (Eveleth 18). During this early contact, Hawaiians were perceived as savages. Nevertheless, because of their innate curiosity regarding American and British culture and their apparent adaptability, the “savages” the missionaries first encounter seem capable of “civilizing.” Mr. Stewart continues: “It is proper, however, to add, that the natives are rapidly adopting the English or American fashion of dress, and procure foreign cloth and garments as fast as they have the means of purchasing them” (Eveleth 22). Ironically, it seems as if Hawaiians did not adopt Western dress as effortlessly and rapidly as Mr. Stewart preferred his readers to believe for Mark Twain's Roughing It bemusedly describes early missionaries’ frustration with Hawaiian clothing, or lack thereof. Twain writes:

Although they were relieved to see Hawaiians experimenting with British or American fashion, missionaries were deeply concerned about their lightheartedness in such matters. By the time Mark Twain traveled to Hawaii in 1866, Hawaiians had adopted a code of dress that covered female genitalia. Hawaiian women wore bright colored robes which covered their arms and draped to their feet (Twain, Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii 27). Although missionaries worked diligently to cover Hawaiian women, Hawaiian women, or so Twain reports, wore “seldom a chemise or any other undergarment” (Twain, Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii 27). Hawaiians adopted some of the missionaries’ fashion, but certainly not all. Hawaiians, to some extent, resolved to remain Hawaiian.

In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock argues that

When Hawaiians resisted or mocked missionaries’ attempts to “civilize” and control them, Hawaiians were resisting acculturation with the dominant imperial powers. The contact zone between missionaries and Hawaiians was one of misunderstanding and tension, at least by missionary accounts. In their letters, missionary wives represented Hawaiians as “large, crude, and barbaric” (Desser 458). Missionaries saw sin and vice in Hawaiian food, entertainment, and sexuality. To the missionaries’ dismay, not only did native Hawaiians eat fruits fresh from the trees, sugar cane, wild hogs, and dogs, the chiefs lived in shocking decadence compared to poorer subjects on the islands. Chiefs, not unlike European monarchs, enjoyed class privilege; Eveleth writes, “the chiefs may truly be said to live at their ease, enjoying a profusion of the produce of the land and sea, and having no other care but ‘to eat, and to drink, and to be merry’” (Eveleth 35). Missionaries also battled the “evils” of polygamy. Missionaries preached that polygamy “is an evil of which we can have no just conception. It is the bane of human society. It destroys at once the sacredness of the relation between husband and wife” (Eveleth 68). Missionaries did not understand the traditional Hawaiian system, which had a feudal structure. Gender played a key role in this system, delineating “class relations, the organization of work, family, and leisure pursuits” (Grimshaw vxi). Christian religion, bolstered by the moral examples set by responsible, “civilized” missionaries, provided instruction and guidance that were thought lacking in Hawaiians. Under their Christian guidance, missionaries believed they saw the awakening intellect of a nation.

The Christianization of Hawaii was not accomplished without resistance. Mark Twain reports, in 1866, that the King said: “[T]he foreigners like their religion – let them enjoy it, and freely. But the religion of my fathers is good enough for me” (Twain, Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii 169). Twain admired the pride and subsequent resistance to assimilation he observed in Hawaiians but he supported a Christian, democratic Hawaii rather than one governed by feudalism. In his Notebook, Twain wrote: “[M]ore missionaries and more row about saving these 60,000 people than would take to convert hell itself” (Twain, Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii viii). Most Hawaiians welcomed foreign people to their islands, accepted their foreign educational systems, converted to Christianity, but worked to retain their traditional customs as they built their own modern Hawaiian empire. The Hawaiian goal was to retain sovereignty while increasing their national profit.

Because of her own religious background, Isabella Bird understands the efforts made by the Christian missionaries who had come to Hawaii before her. Bird came from an upper middle-class family and her father took religious orders. She was also a blood relative, on her father's side, to William Wilberforce, a well-known abolitionist in England (Middleton 20). Her evangelical family was dedicated to “service to God and the community” (Middleton 20). In Bird's early twenties, she was published in Good Words, the Leisure Hour, the Family Treasury, and the Sunday Magazine – all religious journals (Chubbuck, Letters to Henrietta 4). Bird was, no doubt, familiar with the ambition, dedication, and serious intent required of all missionaries.

Bird's travel writing of 1859, The Aspects of Religion in the United States of America, reveals that she believes “Religion displays itself as the most powerful of all social elements” (58). Although there is no established national religion in America, Bird notes “complete religious toleration exists; every man is at liberty to worship God after his own fashion, or not to worship at all” (26). But Christian churches, from Bird's perspective, create “a noble population of freemen . . . dwelling in happy homes, that are the centres of light and love” (58–59). Under the loving Christian God, Bird believes “the distinctions of race and colour vanish” (117). Bird then asserts that “Each nation has the same mission – to bless the world with Christianity and peace, with liberty and enlightenment” (187). She carries these sentiments to Hawaii but focuses her narrative instead on preserving Hawaii the way she finds it – after Christian conversion.

Bird's perspective on Hawaiians differed vastly from nineteenth-century missionary writings; Bird finds value in Hawaiian cultural practices when missionaries found only sin and vice. For many missionaries, the Hawaiian social structure appeared chaotic, at best. One point that seemed foreign was that “chiefly women wielded enormous power” (Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives” 23). The communal practice of childrearing disturbed missionaries; they could not distinguish who the real mothers of children were. Patricia Grimshaw expands on the culture the Christian missionaries found themselves in: “Sexual relations were little restrained in early youth, and marriages were easily terminated; chiefly men and women often had several spouses at the same time” (Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives” 24). Missionaries believed Hawaiians had too much free time which inevitably, in their Protestant eyes, led to corruption. Hawaiians spent too much time “swimming and surfing, in cardplaying, boxing matches, games, cockfights, hulas and other traditional games of skill or chance” (Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives” 28). What made these activities all the more dangerous was the point that the games were “mingled” with “sins” such as gambling and “with sexuality of an overt kind” that “appeared subversive of Christian morals” (Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives” 28). To combat perceived sin and vice, American missionaries shared the American model of femininity with Hawaiian women. Hawaiian women, it was taught, “should be rendered genuinely pious, sexually pure, dutifully submissive and domestically oriented as housewives and mothers” (Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives” 26). Missionaries hoped that such teachings would have the ripple effect and redeem “not only wayward husbands, but the whole kingdom for godly living” (Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives” 26). To get Hawaiians to the point of “godly living,” they had to combat public nudity, urination, bigamy, and adultery. In the 1820s, American missionaries focused on clothing the natives but they “felt exhausted in the cause” since most Hawaiian women retained their traditional customs and “fell far short of the desired model of true womanhood” (Grimshaw, “New England Missionary Wives” 30, 39–40).

When Bird arrives on the Hawaiian scene, missionaries had had a full generation to ingrain their Christian morals on the Hawaiian culture. Hawaiians had also learned ways to subvert missionary practices. When away from white settlers, Bird found that Hawaiians still preferred communal dining, communal child rearing, scant clothing, games and sports. Regardless of their unusual and sometimes baffling cultural practices, Bird thought Hawaiians seemed to be kind, happy people.

The Freedom Found in Nature

It might seem surprising that one of the most vocal supporters of native Hawaiians would be someone who was once a frail, sickly child. Isabella Bird's physical activity was limited by spinal complaints; walking long distances and riding side-saddle were difficult for the young girl (Barr, A Curious Life 28). Her parents did, however, keep her out of doors as often as possible (Stoddart 9). At eighteen, Bird underwent surgery to remove a tumor at the base of her spine (Bach 588). When she was twenty, her doctor prescribed travel to improve her health; she journeyed to America. Yet, the next year, her health suffered again. In her thirties, she continued to experience chronic backaches and moved in with her sister as an invalid (Bach 588). Although she and her sister, Henrietta, lived in a “dignified square” in Edinburgh and had “circle of high-minded, intelligent friends,” Bird's health was never robust (Barr 19). Victorian medicine did little to alleviate her suffering. She frequently took three bromides per day and continued to feel tremors over her body. Her back pains improved occasionally, yet she continued to suffer from other ailments.

Aches and pains of the body, in the nineteenth century, were seen as forms of depression. For male sufferers, doctors recommended stimulating and invigorating exercise such as horseback riding and gymnastics. Fresh air, water, hardy food, and sleep constituted remedies for chronic complaints (Haley 17). In fact, a nineteenth-century handbook for physicians, Tanner's Index of Diseases, “urged against the use of purgatives, sedatives, and narcotics.” Tanner’s instead recommended “strengthers” such as “strychnine, or nux vomica; phosphate of zinc and bark; bromide of potassium; and cod liver oil” (Haley 28). As a woman, however, Bird's prescription was more restrictive, yet she found that when she traveled her health improved. Fresh air and exercise indeed benefited Victorian women as it did Victorian men. In 1872, Bird, at age forty-two, sailed for the Sandwich Islands to soak in the restorative environment of fresh air and sunshine.

As Mark Twain did, but with quite a different perspective, Bird notices that Hawaiian women have considerable liberation in dress. In England, women wore corsets, hats, and one or two layers of petticoats, long skirts, and gloves. Because of Hawaii's tropical climate, women's dress codes underwent a tailoring that Bird appreciated, remarking that “foreign ladies” wore light, simple muslins and white straw hats with native flowers; “[T]he foreign ladies, in their simple, tasteful, fresh attire, innocent of the humpings and bunchings, the monstrosities and deformities of ultra-fashionable bad taste, beamed with cheerfulness, friendliness and kindliness” (Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago 15).

Bird is also amazed by Hawaiian women regularly participating in athletics such as swimming, surf-riding, and horseback riding; these activities only heightened their attractiveness in Bird's eyes. Bird's laudatory comments differ significantly from advice given by conservative British nineteenth-century conduct books and medical books which warned women against participating in such exercises because exercise would make women coarse, unnatural, and may even lead to lesbianism (Ellis, Sexual Inversion 144). One popular Victorian conduct book, Donald Walker's Exercise for Ladies (1837), warns against riding because it produces coarseness and overdevelopment of women's muscles. Hawaiian women, not restricted by traditional Victorian dress or thought, could participate in more demanding physical activities such as horseback riding. By Bird's time, horseback riding was more socially acceptable for women; however, only if women rode on a sidesaddle, not in the male, cavalier style.

The physical activity Bird, and the Hawaiians, enjoy most was horseback riding. Horses, recently imported to Hawaii and easily available, arrived without the strictures about gendered styles of riding (Kuykendall 24). Native Hawaiians rode in the male cavalier style and Bird, influenced by their riding habits, also acquired a Mexican saddle and rode in the cavalier style. The freedom of movement Hawaiian women had, especially on horseback, astounded Bird. Such freedom, she found, contributed to Hawaiian women's robust health. Bird writes:

Bird admires the joyful abandon Hawaiian women demonstrate on horseback. Hawaiian women ride in the manly, cavalier fashion and Bird soon does as well, complete with her own Mexican saddle. It is this sense of power, freedom, and vitality that Bird was searching for and finds in the islands. She rides daily while in the islands and experiences its restorative effects. While in Hawaii, it seems, Bird is no longer an invalid.

Bird tells her readers again and again: “I delight in Hawaii more than ever, with its unconventional life” (Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago 230). Bird is delighted with the unexpected and vigorous. With a new form of intense physical exercise, Bird becomes a new and improved woman. She writes,

Bird writes, “[T]hese are indeed the ‘isles of Eden,’ ‘the sun lands,’ musical with beauty. They seem to welcome us to their enchanted shores. Everything is new but nothing is strange” (Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago 24). The Hawaiians “charmingly embodied an absolute anti-thesis to that Anglo-Saxon Puritan-Christian ethic” that the early American missionaries established (Barr 27). Bird, to some extent, wanted to believe and presented Hawaiian cultures as what anthropologists classified as “genuine.” That is, “genuine cultures were not everywhere” and these “genuine cultures” tend to “turn away from the everywhere-encroaching forces of capitalist modernity” (Buzard 19–20). Bird wrote of carefree Hawaiians who seemed untouched by capitalism, who eat fresh shrimp from streams and sleep on mats under the stars. In fact, capitalist conquest was well underway; it was especially evident in larger ports such as Honolulu. To find the “genuine” or “real” Hawaii, Bird had to embark on excursions to remote and rugged parts of the islands, far from any white settlement. Bird, like other Victorian adventurers, sought an authentic experience with “genuine” places. She did not want to find little replicas of England on her journeys. She did not view herself as a tourist but as an explorer. She wanted to record her experiences with indigenous peoples and untouched lands.

Bird's adventure narrative is a challenge to conservative Victorian ideologies. Bird states she has never seen “people live such easy, pleasant lives” as the native Hawaiians (Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago 64). Speaking to James Buzard's theories on autoethnography and the idea that colonized people “‘talk back’ to their masters and misrepresenters,” I suggest that Bird writes on behalf of Hawaiian Islanders. She presents Hawaiians as having their own unique culture and writes in their favor (Buzard 22). Bird “talks back” to the British and American empires for Hawaiians. She fears “Hawaiians kings have fallen victims to rather unscrupulous foreigners” (Bird, Six Months, 1881 ed., 141). Bird's narrative challenges Victorian ethnographic beliefs because she is building a critique of imperial practices as she reports on Hawaiian culture and as she works to preserve their culture. Contrary to what Perry Anderson asserts, that the British “never produced a classical sociology from within” and that “Britain's liberal bourgeoisie” largely “devoted its energy to the task of diverting social-scientific attention from itself,” I would suggest that Bird gives a snippet, a subtle critique of the bourgeoisie and capitalism as she compares her Hawaiian experience to life, as she perceives it, in Great Britain (Buzard 22 and Anderson 264). Bird attempts to deconstruct British (and American) culture and reform it through her travel text so that the British or American Empires do not exterminate the peaceful, happy Hawaiian culture. Furthermore, Stuart Hall points out that the English thought themselves to be superior, and their culture “perfectly natural,” and “condensed, homogenous, unitary” (Buzard 22–23 and Hall 20–21). Bird is not blind to Britain's self-righteous standpoint; she criticizes British and American narrow mindedness and suggests cultural change because of what she has experienced while in Hawaii. She seeks freedom for women, in dress, in movement, in choice of leisure activities. She also asks British readers to think about how America's policy of manifest destiny will reshape the Pacific.

Bird is a privileged participant-observer in Hawaii. She is accepted into the Hawaiian community, due in part to her equestrian skills, and becomes immersed in the island lifestyle. As a participant-observer, from an ethnographic standpoint, Bird must be “preemptive” and negate “any doubt that the Observer might be lost in the Participant: ethnography happened only insofar as fieldworkers could demonstrate that they had got back ‘outside’ again or, uncannily, that they had somehow remained outside even while passing ‘in’” (Buzard 33). Bird negotiates the role of participant observer by leaving small hints that she does not comprehend or necessary agree with all Hawaiian practices. For example, although Bird does not understand Hawaiian parenting practices, she concludes “[T]hough they are so deficient in adhesiveness to family ties . . . the tie of race is intensely strong, and they are remarkably affectionate to each other” (Bird, Six Months 213). And, while she thoroughly enjoyed her time in Hawaii, she knows she must venture across the ocean, back to her own nation and culture.

Bird confronts popular nineteenth-century conservative social beliefs of “true womanhood” proliferated by women, such as Sarah Stickney Ellis (1812–1872). Ellis, a wife of a missionary, wrote wildly popular books on women and social duties that preached social and domestic usefulness for women (Ogden 585). Bird dutifully tended to her ailing parents before her world travels. When she traveled, she escaped domestic drudgery. Not only did Bird find relief for her ailments, she also found adventure. Ellis finds such a quest for excitement almost sinful, but it is such excitement, such playful adventure which improves Bird's personal health. If it were not for adventure, travel, and physical exertion, Bird would have continued to lead a life of near invalidism. Therefore, by venturing outside of traditional, socially acceptable roles for women that Ellis supports – the cult of True Womanhood – Bird improves not only her health but also her quality of life.

Because they had “deep responsibilities” and “urgent claims” since “a nation's moral wealth is in your keeping,” Ellis believes nineteenth-century women needed no time for excitement and adventure (Ellis, The Women of England 13). Ellis, as the wife of a missionary, knew the toll travel took on people. Yet she was also well aware of the progress made in education and temperance overseas largely due to the London Missionary Society her husband had participated in before she married him (Buelle Hale 648–49). Whereas Ellis advocated for moral, Christian reform, Bird does not shirk her “deep responsibilities”; as she surveys remote foreign lands for the British Empire, she provides valuable cultural information and economic data for imperial investors and politicians.

Ellis and Bird are not as divergent on some points as one might assume. Ellis strongly believed “women should not be ignorant or helpless” (Ellis, The Women of England 298). Bird certainly believed in doing and learning all she could. Both believed women should be capable of handling any duty. The issue of the woman's place of duty is where their philosophies diverge. For Ellis, a morally upright woman finds comfort and satisfaction in the maintenance of a good home – no matter how challenging. Of dutiful, good women, Ellis writes: “[S]he knows that her place in this home is not to be maintained without unceasing care” (Ellis, The Women of England 306). Her inclusive use of the “she” pronoun leaves no woman exempt from social duties. To stress the woman's moral obligation to domesticity, Ellis adds: “[T]he happiness of the whole human family, and especially of man, supplies them with a never-failing motive,” and the care of the family and home should provide women with personal “encouragement and reward” (Ellis, The Women of England 307–08). It is clear, based on Bird's failing health in Britain, that the domestic front did not provide such inherent rewards for her. Bird's travel narrative is radical because she rejects motherhood and domesticity; she challenges British imperial identity, culture, and ideas of True Womanhood.

Issues such as women's health and education saw increased public discussion in the Victorian era, yet ideological constructions of the ideal maternal woman hindered women who were not inclined to accept a domestic lifestyle. Because Bird, for a time, abandons her mother country as well as bourgeois domesticity and instead finds excitement and value in the cultures of outsiders, she rejects Victorian domestic ideologies. However, women's roles in imperial expansion were varied and complicated. As a writer and traveler, Bird was participating in imperial expansion, even when dismantling clichés.