With their crinolines and corsets, it's hard to imagine how women of the past moved comfortably through their own cities, let alone travelled the world. But they did-sometimes alone-and many left detailed written records. From Lady Wortley Montagu, the first western woman known to have visited a Turkish bath, in 1717, to Isabella Bird, who made it as far as Kurdistan and Japan in the 1800s, to Freya Stark, who wandered the Middle East into the 1930s, a surprising number refused to let restrictive ideas about a female's role prevent them from circling the globe.

Their startling adventures have now been woven into a new exhibit at the Vancouver Museum, called No Place for a Lady, opening today (November 10). Drawing on two illustrated and meticulously researched books by local author Barbara Hodgson, 2002's No Place for a Lady and the just-published Dreaming of East, the yearlong display mixes those tales with the museum's artifacts. The show explores what it was like to travel during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and what motivated the women to do it.

"It's rediscovering the spirit of travel. It shows the difficulties, and how they were surmounted. And I also think it brings in a sense of, 'Look, you've got it so easy today,'?" explained Hodgson, leading the way through the still-unfinished project, which she put together with the mus?eum's history curator, Joan Seidl. "When these women, and men at the same time, set out, they weren't thinking about sitting on a beach. They were going for half a year, a year, and you can tell when you read their books that there's so much they looked into and observed."

Because society frowned on overly independent women, they chose to find reasons like pursuing health, religion, or study for undertaking their journeys. One of the exhibit's 11 sections is devoted to intellectual pursuits, and is complemented by an English walking costume from the 1860s. Backed by a multicoloured collage of antique maps, the display has a curio cabinet full of fossils gathered in North America and Egypt in 1836 and 1837, as well as shells, butterflies, and a butterfly net, and a preserved iguana, crocodile, and tortoise-in short, "all kinds of things that a woman with an active mind would either be sketching and making notes about and, maybe, collecting," said Hodgson.

"I don't think the concept of just being a tourist had quite hit universally at that time," added Hodgson, an avid archaeologist, traveller, photographer, and archivist who last curated a show at the museum based on her two books about opium. Speaking about two women adventurers featured in the current exhibit, she said: "Mary Kingsley went to Africa to look for 'fish and fetish', and Gertrude Bell spent a lot of time surveying Byzantine churches and archaeology in the Middle East and founded the Baghdad museum." Other sections focus on painting and photography, two other activities seized on by women that also helped leave a physical record of their trails.

Still, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the exhibit is simply getting a sense of the realities of travel in an age before airliners and Gore-Tex. From examples of what to pack in your steamer trunk to the intricacies of early camping equipment (Hodgson sewed up a Lavinge bag, a combination sleeping bag/mosquito net, from a pattern she found in an 1850 guidebook), the two artifact-heavy rooms bring a slower-paced era to life. In remote mountains and deserts, the women trekked by horse or camel, or rented sailboats to go up the Nile, stopping at every temple. Sometimes they kept maids or hired a personal dragoman-as photos and engravings in the exhibit show, an often-handsome Middle Eastern guide/interpreter, dashing in knee-high boots, a striped cummerbund, and mustaches-who would accompany them for months at a time.

Besides shopping at bazaars and being hauled up Egyptian pyramids by local guides (after leaving their crinolines in Cairo, of course), the one important thing women could do-and that men couldn't-was visit harems. A particularly elaborate mock-up of a room illustrates these sensual realms that disappeared with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, complete with carpets, cushions, hookahs (smoking pipes), brass trays, tea sets. It also incorporates the show's star artifact: an Egyptian wooden lattice screen from coastal Danietta, dating to at least the 1700s and maybe earlier, designed to let the harem's women see outside while not being visible themselves.

Hodgson, who has toured the world extensively, acknowledged that she shares the investigative spirit of these early travellers. She recalled that while researching her fictional 2004 book The Lives of Shadows, she found herself following an old map through the ancient quarter of Damascus, noting that while all the names had changed, the street pattern was virtually identical. (At the French archives, she later learned the map dated to the 1200s.) "So I was going along with this map, a camera around my neck, a shoulder bag with things-paper and stuff-writing down the new names of the streets, and I was like, 'I'm turning into one of my ladies! This is ridiculous! I must look just totally silly with all this stuff!'"