This month, I went backpacking in Costa Rica without much of an itinerary but with a typhoid vaccine and a reading list. As I was preparing, friends were surprised that I was traveling alone, even though I speak Spanish and have lived abroad. It hit me that what I was doing would have been an aberration even a generation ago.

Accompanying the release of the movie adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild were discussions about the lack of travel narratives with women as protagonists. The ones that come to mind for me are in the vein of The Sheik by E.M. Hull, where a woman traveling alone serves to set up catastrophe. I didn’t want to get immersed in stories of vulnerability where I needed to project confidence for my own safety. Instead, I read about women in society throughout the twentieth century.

I started with Mary McCarthy’s The Group, then followed with The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel.

While I was expecting raise my own awareness of the constraints that women used to face, I was struck by how much of all three books could have been contemporary. The contrast I found instead was how gendered I felt in everyday life compared to relatively genderless travel. Maybe it was because everyone looks about the same humping around a backpack and wearing linen. Maybe near-total freedom is coded as male, and it rubs off. Regardless, I identified as a tourist or gringo much more than as a woman. And I felt so self-assured, cocky even.

I gave my copy of The House of Mirth to a French woman I bunked with at a hostel. It was thunder storming, and we were taking a ferry back to San Jose, surrounded by women taking care of babies while their husbands ignored them. I didn’t want to put Lily Bart back on my bookshelf because I resented her for not being able to save herself.

My foremothers fought for me to have freedom and opportunity that men have taken for granted and women barely have begun to enjoy. I am so satisfied that I could head to the jungle to commemorate them.