… but also a rhetorical mode of writing one’s self in relation to the other. Furthermore, sociability enabled female authors to tackle political issues, a field considered to be inappropriate in the education of eighteenth-century women. … in enlightened progress would make her more than often quite dogmatic: ‘The most essential service, I presume, that authors could render to society, would be to promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making those dogmatical … exercised a powerful shaping influence on women’s accounts generating a degree of de facto difference from male-authored narratives’. 5 If women’s travelogues never outnumbered those of men during the eighteenth and nineteenth …