A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

In August 1901, five hundred American women boarded the transport ship Buford in San Francisco, bound for the Philippines. They were the Thomasites, a group of teachers sent by the U.S. government to educate the children of a country America had recently conquered. Mary H. Fee was among them, and her account of that journey and the years that followed is a remarkable artifact from a pivotal, troubled moment in history. Fee writes with warmth, wit, and an observer's sharp eye. She captures the seasickness and camaraderie of the voyage, the strange collision of American optimism with Filipino reality, and the daily texture of life in a colonial territory. As a teacher in the islands, she encountered a world that resisted easy understanding: a culture neither simply exotic nor simply foreign, and a people whose own relationship to American rule was complicated, contested, and never passive. This is not a romantic travel narrative, nor is it a polemic. It is something more interesting: a thoughtful woman's attempt to make sense of her own role in an empire's project, written with enough self-awareness to question what she sees and enough honesty to record it anyway. For readers interested in American history, colonial literature, or the overlooked voices of women who shaped the Pacific world, Fee's account remains essential.