Dozing on a seat beside the boarding gate, I was suddenly called to attention by a diffident tap on my shoulder. The slightly panicked face of a young woman stared back at me in askance — she seemed unsure of what she was meant to do next. She was, like me, travelling alone. But this being her first experience of solo travel, excitement competed with anxiety on her face. The same face, though, was filled with a mix of contentment and pride as we deboarded.
Solo travel for women is on the rise. Reports show that women make up around two-thirds of solo travellers in Britain; in India, there has been a 135% rise in solitary women travellers between 2023 and 2025; and in the US, 72% women prefer travelling alone. The motivations, surveys reveal, vary — a desire for tranquility, curiosity, or simply a time wherein they have to answer to no one. Whatever their purpose, these are women who would make the original ‘audacious trespasser’, Virginia Woolf, proud.
When Woolf demanded that a woman must have money and a room of her own, she was trying to eke out a space in which they can think, act and exist unselfconsciously. Nearly a century later, though, women want to step out of that room, to travel alone, to claim space in the world. Unlike the woman with a room of her own, the solo female traveller does not retreat to think. She ventures out to encounter things to think about.
Historically, the domestic sphere was supposed to contain a woman’s imagination and her body. The sight of a woman out in the world by herself thus unsettles social order. It makes her visible, unpredictable, and, consequently, potentially subversive. This is why solo female travel is so often described with words like ‘brave’, ‘risky’ and ‘defiant’. These adjectives are not compliments. They betray a lingering disbelief that a woman can belong out in the world without escort or justification.
The woman traveller thus moves through a world that was not designed for her freedom. Every step she takes requires small acts of calculation: which street is safe to walk down, which flight seat to choose — a middle seat between two manspreading men can make for an intensely uncomfortable journey — when to feign confidence and so on. The dangers women face are both material and cultural. There are tangible threats of harassment, surveillance, and vulnerability in unfamiliar spaces. But there is also the subtler hostility of being regarded as out of place, of carrying the burden of explanation for being out in the world unchaperoned. These challenges are reminders of how the world still polices female mobility. After all, the fears that women are taught to internalise — fear of being alone, of being seen, of taking up space — are the most effective mechanisms of control. To travel alone, then, is to unlearn that conditioning in real time.
But such an unlearning comes at a cost. Woolf’s insistence that economic freedom is essential to intellectual freedom for women remains painfully relevant. The ability to travel alone still depends on means and opportunity — resources unevenly distributed across class, race, and geography. What is worse is that a trip taken alone by women is too easily dismissed as frivolous or self-indulgent. Yet this is exactly the kind of expenditure Woolf meant when she spoke of the financial means to think freely. Travel undertaken for one’s own curiosity or rest is a declaration that one’s inner life has economic value. To fund a journey from one’s own earnings, for no purpose but exploration, is to buy autonomy for oneself.
The emancipatory power of travel lies in its ordinariness. When women travelling through the world cease to be newsworthy, Woolf’s vision of freedom will finally have expanded from the study to the street. Until then, every woman who traverses an unfamiliar city alone continues her argument that autonomy is not a privilege, it is a right.