Respuesta :
Answer:
The option that best characterizes the contradiction that the author refers to is:
E. While traveling alone in the nineteenth-century was considered a radical act for a woman, the nineteenth-century solitary female travelers generally held conventional views.
Explanation:
[...] solitary travelers espoused traditional values, eschewing radicalism and women’s movements. [...] the female travelers seemed content to leave society as it was while accomplishing their own liberation. In other words, they lived a contradiction.
The lines above have what we need to answer this question. The contradiction referred to in the passage concerns the female travelers of the 19th century. Even though those women were doing something considered astonishing back then - women were not supposed to travel on their own -, they were not breaking boundaries and taboos as they could have been. They were conventional in their general views, not worrying about society remaining the way it was. As long as they were free to do what they wanted, they did not feel the need to fight so that other women could do what they wanted as well. Thus, being revolutionary and, at the same time, conventional was their contradiction.