Chapter Four examines accounts of female transiency from the early twentieth century. Analysing writings by and about Dolly Kennedy Yancy, Agnes Thecla Fair, Kittie Solomon and Barbara Starke (whose real name was Helen Card), the chapter argues that female transient writing provides a different focus to representations of transient women written by men. When they do write about women, male writers obsess about sex: presenting the road as a place of moral danger or a space of fantastical sexual liberation. Female authors, on the other hand, treat sex as merely one aspect, and often an annoying one, of the transient experience. Yancy, Fair, Solomon and Starke focus on the liberatory aspects of moving beyond domestic confinement that transiency can offer to women in the early twentieth century. Yancy and Solomon discuss sex rarely. Fair and Starke both discuss incidents of sexual assault or harassment. Stake in particular represents male sexual harassment as a constant background noise to the female transient experience.

Focussing on writing by Ralph Keeler, Lee Meriweather, Harry Franck, Stephen Graham and Vachel Lindsay, Chapter Two charts the development of a subgenre of writing that combines the slumming narrative with the travelogue, which I call the ‘vagabond travel narrative’. In this subset of travel literature, a narrator attempts to sightsee without money. These narratives make a spectacle of the supposed ingenuity of the narrator in acquiring, in the absence of financial capital, what I call ‘experiential capital’. Yet these texts also reveal, against the intentions of their authors, that it is their privilege as white men that enables these journeys and experiences. Vagabond writers set themselves apart from hobos and tourists, seeing both groups as too closely associated with modernity. Unlike the hobo, the vagabond travels to escape modernity – to go ‘off road’, rather than ‘on the road’, we might say. Yet Vachel Lindsay in particular shows an uneasy solidarity with the transient workers whom he inevitably encounters.