A Presentation for the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference: “Histories from the Margins: Innovation and Adaptation in Atlantic Canada”

Abstract:

Women working at sea crossed more than international boundaries.  They did not belong on ships – contemporaries as well as eulogists of the Age of Sail were keen to establish the maritime world as not a predominantly, but an exclusively masculine world.  Yet over the course of the nineteenth century women worked at sea not only in ever-greater numbers, but with an increasingly well-defined role and place.  Ships’ stewardesses became bulwarks between the masculine world of the ship and female passengers, at once transgressing and defining shipboard spaces as appropriate and inappropriate, domestic and professional, maritime and terrestrial. They also became representative of the rise of steam – especially identified with catering departments on luxury liners – but neither steam technology nor roles as ‘shipboard domestics’ encompass the full duties or significance of stewardesses and their impact on the changing maritime world of the nineteenth century.  

This talk will describe cohorts of ship stewardesses found in British crew agreements collected by the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project, and the ways in which they both defy and meet the expectations of their contemporaries.From their roots as servants of passengers, through their role on immigrant ships as enforcers of the separation of the sexes, to their relegation out of the maritime world and into the catering department of luxury liners, stewardesses stood always at the borders, at once necessary and out of place.By being outside of shipboard space, they, in turn, defined it, only to have their history forgotten.