My Current Research

“But then, you’ll say, she was used to the sea”: Britain’s Nineteenth-Century Empire and Women’s Work at Sea

Abstract:

Women have always gone to sea, like men, as necessity dictates.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, their presence gained new significance as laws and social practices combined to define roles for women as seafaring laborers.  Through this definition, women gained accepted space aboard ships, but lost the many liminal, indeterminate, and too-often invisible spaces in which they previously worked. 

Likewise, the experiential and technological changes stemming from the death of the Age of Sail fostered anxiety in Britain over a fading imperial past.  Women’s roles on ships arose concurrently with steam technology, and in contrast to a mythology of the maritime past, built over the course of the nineteenth century through a new genre of popular literature: the nautical novel.  This mythology redefined oceanic space from a predominately male-occupied space to one reserved for, and productive of, a specifically masculine, nationalistic ideal.

Contemporary naval theorists and politicians reaffirmed that the British Empire’s foundation lay in sea power.As the social and material circumstances of predominance at sea changed – as in employment patterns; new regulations; the visceral differences between sail and steam; and new demographics of seafaring labor, including women – so changed the empire, revealing culture’s hidden effects on the exercise of power.Examining women’s work at sea reveals the divides between masculine and feminine, sail and steam, nationalist imaginary and practical reality underlying the tensions, seen and unseen, which led to the undoing of Britain’s maritime empire.