from Part II - The Vagabond and the Tramp
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2023
Chapter Four examines accounts of female transiency from the early twentieth century. Analysing writings by and about Dolly Kennedy Yancy, Agnes Thecla Fair, Kittie Solomon and Barbara Starke (whose real name was Helen Card), the chapter argues that female transient writing provides a different focus to representations of transient women written by men. When they do write about women, male writers obsess about sex: presenting the road as a place of moral danger or a space of fantastical sexual liberation. Female authors, on the other hand, treat sex as merely one aspect, and often an annoying one, of the transient experience. Yancy, Fair, Solomon and Starke focus on the liberatory aspects of moving beyond domestic confinement that transiency can offer to women in the early twentieth century. Yancy and Solomon discuss sex rarely. Fair and Starke both discuss incidents of sexual assault or harassment. Stake in particular represents male sexual harassment as a constant background noise to the female transient experience.
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