MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 1946, Boston natives Katharine Van Etten Lyford and Joan Rothwell embarked on a yearlong motor journey through South America. The two women traveled on the partially completed Pan American Highway in a 1935 Ford Coupe they affectionately called “Junior.” Unlike previous female travelers, Lyford and Rothwell illegally navigated the route from Ecuador to Brazil sin hombre—without a man. While exploring the continent, the pair documented their adventures for the Christian Science Monitor in a forty-installment serial titled “Junior’s Girls.” Upon returning to Boston, Lyford and Rothwell expanded the series into a second, five-hundred-page travel memoir: Without A Man. In the unpublished manuscript, Lyford and Rothwell present their treacherous travels through a lens of assumed female naïveté with a poignant undercurrent of post-World War II feminist independence. The façade of traditional gender norms not only masks the narrative in respectability, but its intersection with the pair’s socially perceived unfeminine behavior also serves as the story’s central plot line. However, this gendered tension is notably missing in an alternative and unfinished version of Lyford and Rothwell’s travel memoir: Con Mucho Gusto: Culinary Adventures in South America. In this third version of their travel narrative, an increased awareness of the presence of local women replaces the emphasis on the absence of men. Local recipes frame charming vignettes set in kitchens where the culinary exchanges between women break down the boundaries of age, social class, culture, and ethnicity. Despite the differences between the memoirs, the gendered nuances do not contradict one another but instead provide a complementary insight into the complexity of Lyford and Rothwell’s perception of their own gender performance as North American travelers driving through South America.