Abstract
For near on five decades, scholars have repeatedly made the call that the power geometry of the seas pans out differently in a world acknowledged as divided by gender. Tiresome as it has become, the responsibility for the rebarbative character of the call does not rest with the scholars who continue to make it. That responsibility falls to the passivity of others who are unmindful of, or unmoved by, the challenges to the binary closure of social and economic relations that come with the putative apartness of men aboard vessels. The most remarkable part of this is that the onus has never shifted from canvassing the proofs that women matter in maritime history to providing the proofs that they do not. So, much as it is heartening to see that the producers of a series esteemed amongst gender historians chose ‘Gender and the Sea’ as the theme of its 2022 compendium, I approached this review wondering whether essays published under the imprint of a Yearbook of Women's History will garner a readership where it is needed.
I am pressed by a word limit to do any more than use the headings of each of the four sections to indicate the spread of the volume's content by period and sea geography. Moreover, my sampling from some of the five chapters in each of these sections will have to suffice to indicate why this scholarship merits attention from any researcher of on-board life and labour. The coverage ranges from passenger liners to scientific survey vessels, from pirate ships to floating schoolrooms, and from the ships used and mythologized by ancient Greco-Romans to those similarly involved in the politics and culture of South East Asia. There cannot be a vessel domain that does not reward a dedication to perspectives that are unhitched from the de-historicizing essentialism and naturalizing that keeps women out of sight, and all the more so at a time when maritime history's ‘terraqueous’ framing should have rendered those limiting practices empirically unstable and ethically questionable.
‘Women and Children First’ is a section dedicated to ‘Uncovering the Presence of Women On Board’. The veteran researcher of shipmasters’ wives, Joan Druett, reminds us where the US research began – in the 1970s and 1980s with an emphasis on masters’ wives aboard whaling vessels. Other authors show how the paradigms have progressed since the fallacy of numbers denied traction to the contemporaneous research from the Scandinavians that concerned women crewing fishing vessels. Research reported in the volume's final chapter, by Russell Fielding and Ina Seethaler, presents ‘whaling wives’ in a recently acquired role in the contemporary, shore-based fishery of the Faroe Islands. They reveal how relations between women have been tested by ecological concerns, not least whether the toxicity of whale meat removes the justification for a food fishery. In a different vein, the work and wages of stewards and stewardesses inform an empirically well-conceived comparative analysis by Kristof Loockx, which makes the point that until the growing importance on North Atlantic liners of personal service and care work is grasped, gender will remain the under-determining structural factor in the late nineteenth-century market for seafaring labour. It falls to several contributors to show that the absence of women in the corporeal sense enhances the palpability of their affective presence. Sarah Lentz and Iris van der Zande, respectively, bring more than one might imagine to the reworking of on-board spaces of exclusion and inclusion by recognizing that children on board factored into seafarers’ awareness of the liminal presence of ‘others’.
The second section, ‘Experiences at Sea’, is further qualified by the subtitle ‘Women Travelling from Europe to Asia and Australia’. In accounts of long-distance voyages penned by men, we see how early modern patriarchs used the differences conjured into the sea-borne (im)mobility of women and the mobility of men to exercise moralizing propensities. In studying an unfaithful wife and a cross-dressing soldier in one account by a traveller to Batavia on a Dutch East India Company vessel in 1675, Simon Karstens elaborates this theme with particular sensitivity. Later, Stefan Roel Reyes makes an arresting start to his chapter with a counterpart subject found in the papers of the High Court of Admiralty – a seafarer unconflicted by eliciting his landlord to pimp a prostitute for his first sexual experience, even while he anticipates the wholesomeness of the woman who would be his bride and homemaker.
The double standard of sexual morality is at the core of the third section, ‘Violence and Victims: Gendered Agency On Board’. Here are powerful discussions of the sexualization of shipboard relations. Virginia W. Lunsford calls ‘Time's Up’ in respect of historians’ indulgence of the barbarity of pirates to their female victims, while Jo Stanley elaborates on the growth of her concern with sexual violence and harassment at sea during a long and productive career that has brought past seafaring women's lives to bear on the prejudices faced in their present.
‘Stories to Be Told’, the final section, further illuminates several earlier themes, with the emphasis falling on the symbolic representation of women at sea. Here, Muhammad Buana's chapter, ‘Gender, Migration and Power in Sulawesi and Javanese Traditions’, engages non-western perspectives. But Djoeke van Netten's attempt to extend those perspectives in an otherwise admirable introduction references the one vessel that seems out of place in this collection – the craft mastered by a fictional Polynesian princess, Moana, in the multi-million-dollar-earning Disney film of that name released in 2016. It is, however, the misstep that puts the critically informed, primary-sourced gender work of the volume's contributors into a spotlight, where they should not be missed by other historians.