This article is dedicated to the complex web of gender and colonial relationships in biographical writing. The author's main focus is on publications by two women of high society who traveled through the colonial North in the early 20th century, Danish Emilie Demant-Hatt (1873-1958) and Scottish Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982). An analysis of these textual and visual works allows us to see how they made a contribution to the colonial project, while undermining it at the same time, and how colonial femininity combines obedience and disobedience.