The choice of a women to venture in the world alone is never easy. It is a deed that is preceded by a chorus of supposedly good intentions but ultimately limiting issues and a symphony of anxieties created by a society that has given centuries of teaching to the female gender that their safety relies on their status and their freedom exists on a temporary basis. In Lahore, it can seem a sort of radical idea. Women hear the suspicions in family living rooms and during chai with friends: it is not safe to be alone as a woman. “Surprise for me, who are you go ing with ? ” The question will always be, what will people say? And these questions, sometimes, born of love, are also the unconscious guards of patriarchy structure, a structure that aims at restricting the movements of a woman and, consequently, its autonomy. They portray a very deeply rooted feeling that the place of a woman in this world, is a relational and guarded place that will always cling to either a father, a brother, or a husband. That is why once a woman goes and gets that ticket, gets that bag packed and goes out to the world on her own behalf, she is doing much more than having a holiday. She is feminist making an individualistic and a strong statement. It is her own, silent, resistance, a revolution in her head that seeks to disturb all the mythological underpinnings that have tried to shape her and immobilize her.
On the basic level, solo travelling is a space reclamation process, in any context. This is instilled in girls as they grow up that the street should not be their space. They are taught to observe, they are told to watch their appearances, to go down in size so as to mitigate any form of unasserted reputation. Their posture, their way, their presence, is to be sculpted by the invisibility of the male gaze as an architect. The environment has been shown as one where chances of being hurt are high, a place that should be crossed without much delay and with maximum security in mind, an escort should be your male guardian. Solo traveling woman totally dismisses this assumption. Each time she walks, she makes it clear that she has a non-negotiable right to be in the world and unchaperoned and unafraid. Whether she is taking a coffee by herself in a cafe in Vienna, exploring the jammed souk in Marrakech, or just being in a park bench in Buenos Aires, she is taking her own space without worry or care. She is asserting that the world is her home as well and it is not something in which she will be confined in its closed domestic parts. The mere image of a woman walking fearlessly through the twisting alleys of the Walled City, or taking and sipping her tea on her own in one of the roadside stalls, is a revolutionary moment in a cultural set-up that, at times, seems largely suffocated by males. It conveys a non-verbal message that she is also where she is supposed to be.
This recuperation goes inwards, within the confines of the personal space of her own mind and will. Life consists of consultations and compromises to many women. Decisions whether small or big are frequently made with the consultation and acceptance of other people. This is a total departure of the solo journey. She has to decide everything, perhaps, for the first time in her life, and all by herself. When to rise, what to eat in the morning, which way to take a stroll, whether to spend the day in a museum or on a mountainside: all these questions in a way constitute an act of pure unadulterated autonomy. She is taught to learn to hear what her heart is saying, these small little murmurings that could have been silenced by the decibel of outside expectations all of her whole life. She finds out what she really likes, what is she bored of, what is challenging, what makes her calm. It is not only freedom but self-creation. She does not identify herself as a part of other people, but of the world and the inner world. She is reinstating her rights to the story which is hers and which she is the undisputed heroine of.
The pilgrimage made by a lone woman adventurer is also effective deconstruction of a largely patriarchal myth of the damsel in distress. Over the several centuries, literature, art and culture supported the notion of women as the weaker sex that is by nature vulnerable and requires a male protection. Such story is used to justify domination, when women are always at a risk, they must be taken care of and care is a kind term used when it comes to caging. Such a single travel ruins this narrative with a blow of the reality. The single woman is her own shield, her own breadwinner and her own rescuer. When her train is cancelled, she does not sit and wait to see where her hero will come to rescue her; she studies time tables, discusses with station agents and eventually finds the alternative route. When she is lonely or alienated, she becomes her own best friend or gets the boldness to meet new people. She becomes her own financial planner when she has to manage her budget when staying in more than one country.
It is not to say that risks do not exist. There is danger in the world and even when a woman is alone traveling she should be intelligent, equipped and fully aware. The feminist declaration, however, is situated in deciding that she has the capability, smarts, and strength to handle these dangers all by her self. It is the story of giving up the choking security of a gilded cage, and exchanging it with the hard-won liberty of the open sky. It is the understanding that the worst threat was never the person lurking in the dark alley, but the pernicious assumption that she was unable to deal with him by herself. She now takes back the narrative of a damsel in distress by tackling any adversary, including a difficult subway system and an uninvited sexual advance, with foresight, wit, and dexterity. She demonstrates that she is not safer when a man is around or not. Her wisdom and her power are what keep her safe.
This movement cannot exist without economic and social independence, which are also part of the foundation of the feminist movement. Even the fact of taking such a trip can be an indicator of economic independence of a woman. The fact that she finds her own money, which she has earned herself, through her own labour, to invest in an experience that she chooses herself, is a mighty statement of self-sufficiency. It practically cuts the financial ties which have traditionally enslaved women to the patriarchal forms of family. At the social level, the journey enables a woman to momentarily be outside the network of relation identities, which in many ways define her. She is neither a daughter, a sister, a wife nor a mother. She is nothing more than an individual passing in the world. This experience is extremely emancipating. It enables her to develop her relationship with her self that would not be dependent upon persons outside of her self. What she figures out is that she does not have to be whole and happy with someone, and this has made her self-sufficient in any relationships in the future. It questions the cultural clock of the society pressuring women into marriage and children, claiming that spending time alone to explore and grow as an individual is not only healthy behavior, but an otherwise decent and worthwhile decision to live by.
But the feminist declaration of solo travel is not only about rebellious individualism but also on a novel sort of unity and affiliation. Although patriarchal discourses have taught us to believe that the world is a dangerous place, most women who have traveled alone have found that it is actually full of hearted people and a strong, informal network of women all over the world. Other women commonly provide the most unforgettable assistance and support when being out on a road. It is the middle-aged lady in a Vietnamese market who puts a seller of over-prices in place. Not only is it the female who owns the guesthouse in Italy that shares with you a cup of tea and a few comforting words at the point when you are feeling homesick. The other solo female traveler in hostel is the one who will give safety advice, share experiences, and will know immediately what your adventures are like. These experiences create a strong sense of common female experience that cuts across boundaries, languages and cultures. They build a global support system that makes women aware of each other; a kind of safety net that is not visible. This is the positive, unifying side of the feminist statement: she demonstrates that it is not only in the indomitable individual, but the united group that one can find strength.
After all the hard work, the most lasting effect of a journey is during the returning. An unaccompanied woman that has traveled around the world is not returning home as a similar person. She is more comfortable, more capable, more flexible, has a much broader view of the world. She has overcome fears and achieved complex problems and has learned to trust self all the way. There is a ripple effect of this transformation. At the place of work, she would tend to become a leader, she would be able to raise her voice and speak with confidence, and she would be able to tackle challenges in a composed manner with an air of assurance. She turns out to be a great role model in her family and neighborhood. Her quest debunks the world to other females. By telling us about her competence and courage, she liberates her friends, her sisters, her nieces, and her colleagues to dream on a larger scale, to confront their own fears and to think of their own paths of likehood. The woman who walked out of Lahore with the burden of social expectations on her shoulders does it in a new avatar now because she has lived to have the power to re-negotiate her belongingness to that society. Her one-woman adventure was not a running away, but a pilgrimage to herself, and the pilgrimage a person and especially a woman had to make, to acquire tools she needed to create the more authentic and empowered life back home.
This returning woman who feels strengthened by her experience emerges to be a very understated yet very strong agent of upheaval even in her own world. The waves of her feminist declaration do not start with large and resonant declaring, but in small silent reconfiguring of her staying in the domestic and family realm. This is usually where the heaviest and most difficult work starts in a collectivist culture such as Lahore where the family stability and conventional roles reign supreme. The woman who has been spending months on end as the sole architect of the days she spends also has less chances of passively accepting the possibility that her time is simply not as important as the time the men in the household have. She could simply ask, why is it that she is supposed to be the one who serves the guests tea or is the one to tidy up the table and at the same time her brother is left talking without being interrupted. There is nothing to do with the denial of family, or tradition, but a renegotiation of her position within tradition, a lesser-noticed insistence that things be fair, that the way things are won be fair, that it was fair in the small, casual practices of everyday life where patriarchal relations are most entrenched.
One of the hard-core convictions of her new independence is the empowered use of the word no. To a lot of women who have been taught to be pleasant and compromise, saying no to social or familial commitment may come with a lot of guilt. The person who goes it alone has had to respond with “no” many times on her trip–to touts who won t give up, to solicited avances, to arrangements that seemed not just right. This is something that she has perfected, because she does not see this as a rejection behavior, but as a behavior of self-protection, and setting of boundaries. By the time she comes back, she can say no to a family obligation that exhausts her, an activity in social life that she does not feel like doing, a demand that violates her personal time and intentions. She is taught how to do it with poise but with the insistence that states her self worth is no longer in bargain. It is, on the face of it, an extreme claim on her particular needs and desires against a background that frequently favors a common good, and the will of the patriarch in particular.
She is financially independent, and she used to use the money to support her journeys but now this is turning against her as a strong opinion in family affairs. She has more than proven herself in working complex budgets in several different countries and is no longer satisfied with being a mere spectator with regards to financial matters at home. She has the competency to offer, and she is proving it, and the norm that most people do not like to state openly is that they expect that the indisputable custodians of financial management decisions within a family should be men. She may be the director of family budget, she may have well-informed views on investments, or she may be fairly able to talk about her relations with finance and future expectations. It is not about money with this statement; it is about demanding her position as an equal stakeholder of the family security and future showing that her competence is far beyond some domestic domain.
Her new kind of ambition is the result of internalized feminism in her professional life. Her practical skills are a strong remedy to the imposter syndrome that dwells too many talented women. Once you have managed a medical emergency in a language that is not your native one or unsuccessfully rerouted a multi-leg trip when it was canceled, the patronizing comment of a fellow male employee or a presentation that requires a lot of effort to be delivered, does not seem so daunting. Her manner is one of eminent silence of a person who has undergone trial in much more uncertain fields and has come out of them successful. Through this self-confidence, she is able to take her space during the meetings, to propose her ideas without any excuse, and to object certain stereotypes whenever she comes across them. Indeed, her ambition can no longer be an issue of personal promotion but something she combines with the aspiration to achieve a more balanced job. She uses the principle of global sisterhood that she had learnt during her voyages in her local setting intuitively. She also becomes a mentor to other junior female workers, she pro-actively sponsors her work, and tries to raise her own voice by making it count, she tries to promote other women voices and to ensure their contribution is heard and appreciated.
Being exposed to other cultures and life styles broadened her worldview and she is a more critical and aware employee. She rather would challenge the morality of a company or would criticize a culture of the workplace not accommodating to everyone. Her goal setting also changes, she can then work in a place where she believes in the predicts of the organization but that might be less glamorous, as she has grown to include more significant purpose and effect in her idea of success. She is also less eager to divide her principles into rigid parts as she knows that her career and her personal moral cannot be put separately. The feminist statement that the feminism started with a passport and a backpack has the support of her professional life now, where she is directed to work on what she enjoys, but it is also something that makes the world a better, and more equal place.
The returning traveler herself as well proves to be an effective story-teller, and the manner in which she narrates her story, that is in itself a political activity. She gets a chance to actively engage with conscious resistance to the reductive tendencies to which women are subjected in terms of their journeys. Her tale does not come out as a naive Eat, Pray, Love ideal of a woman only finding herself after following a male spiritual teacher or falling in love with a man of another country. Her life comprises of all out self-help. She is the hero in the story when she tells her struggles. The problem was solved by her; the way was discovered and the fear was faced. That is why she defocusses the men in her story not with a bad intention, of course, but with the purpose to concentrate on the truth of the matter which is that her development and her victory were hers. In this narration, she offers a strong and different script of female adventure, one that appreciates independence and effectiveness as opposed to love and heroism.
This narration is an educational process especially with the men in her life. She can react not to frustrations when her father, brothers are anxious about their protective role, but she can offer her own ability through narrating stories. She will be able to tell the story of her getting lost in the streets of a complicated city and finding her way back or how she managed to find a satisfactory offer price in a chaotic market or about her instant friendship with yet another woman who managed to deliver her out of a quagmire. These narratives are not only entertaining; they are reformative in the inconspicuous way. They fight against the maternal feelings based on the presupposition of the female frailty. They taught the men in her life to not treat the women in their lives as soulful creatures that need protection and care all the time but empowered, capable individuals who needed to be trusted and be left to themselves.
This adds a new dimension to the debate of safety. As the fearless globetrotter returns home safely, he or she starts doubting the provocation of safety. She understands that safety is not an absence of physical threat of a stranger. Unfulfilled life, unattained potential, a crushed soul strangled by closed horizons is another form of danger of the familiar. She realizes that the mental constraints of suppression can be equally damaging as any physical danger does. This subtle insight enables her to change the discussion on the safety of women in her community. Rather than accepting the discourse that women need to stay at home in order to be safe, she stays true to the Maxims because she insists on a world, where they are safe outside. She promotes skill-based safety, or, in other words, self-defense and situational awareness classes, and systemic safety: enhancement of the infrastructure in the cities, such as safer and more proper street lighting or more efficient and reliable transportation. She helps in changing the responsibility of security to the society and not on the one that would be a victim.
After all, the solo journey does not come out as a one off event, but instead it turns out to be the beginning of a lifetime of feminist self. The journey is the place where the course is done; the life back in the house is where those skills are put into practice. It is not, in the act of departing, that the feminist statement exists, but in the confident, conscious, and enduring manner in which she occupies her life when she returns. It is in her undying faith in what she can do, her unwillingness to live up to expectations of the past and her anguish to make room in this world of today, and still tomorrow, to the women that will follow her. The journey was a powerful change and now, it is she, again, who starts to change her world and not with the huge deeds but with the timeless strength of her own example. She stands there as an ever present, living example to the fact that the world a woman creates is as great as her fearlessness to create it and that the greatest trip she takes in her life is the one she sets herself upon both globally and in the complex, demanding, and stunning environment of her home.
