CD2 - Track 05 | Текст песни

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And with us in the studio today we have Joanne Bright, author of a new book about women travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Joanne, it can’t have been easy to travel the world then, especially as a woman. These women must have been terribly brave and adventurous.
Well, some of them certainly were, but we mustn’t forget that probably most women travellers didn’t actually choose to make their journeys in the first place. Their husbands decided to go abroad, or were sent abroad, and the women followed. That was certainly the case with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose husband was sent as ambassador to Istanbul in Turkey, in 1716.
Didn’t she want to go?
Well, we don’t know for sure, but she certainly seemed to enjoy herself when she got there! She wrote a series of letters back to her friends and family, which were published after her death. The unusual thing about Lady Mary is how open she was to the new culture. In fact, in many ways, she decided that it was much better than her own. She commented on how polite the Turkish ladies were about her European dress, pointing out that English ladies would probably have laughed at someone dressed as differently as she was. In fact, she started wearing Turkish dress herself. And she noticed the Turkish women protecting their children against the disease of small pox by using inoculation, where a small dose of the disease was given to prevent them catching the disease badly later. Lady Mary had recently caught smallpox herself and her face was very badly damaged as a result, so she very much wanted to protect her children from it. She had her son inoculated in Turkey, the first English person to be protected in this way, and, when she returned home to England, she helped to persuade the English doctors to develop a similar technique.
Goodness, she really achieved something through her visit then.