Women on the Water: The Feminine Seascape Onboard Nova Scotia’s Nineteenth Century Deepwater Merchant Sailing Vessels

Abstract

Seafaring has long been considered as inherently masculine. This perspective has shaped the cultural legacy of Nova Scotian seafaring women, whose contributions to maritime industries are often forgotten or marginalized. This thesis challenges the dominant masculine seascape by establishing an equivalent feminine seascape. The feminine seascape recontextualizes ships as part of a woman’s household, a structure of power that bestowed married women with significant authority. By studying the life-writing of three Nova Scotian sea captains’ wives during the age of sail, as well as contemporary English-language newspapers and print culture, this thesis explores the paradoxical nature of women’s power within patriarchal systems, arguing that seafaring both challenged and reinforced ideals of Victorian married womanhood. Ideologies of domesticity provided sea captains’ wives with a discursive lens through which they could interpret maritime spaces and activities as normative for their phase of life. My thesis argues that this enabled captains’ wives to construct a multifaceted feminine seascape. It contributes to a growing field of gender history at sea and alters our understanding of captains’ wives. In doing so, it contributes to regional histories by positioning the experiences of rural, middle-class women as cosmopolitan and transnational, thereby disrupting the parochial and conservative narratives often attributed to, and occasionally embraced by, the Maritimes.