Abstract
This book is timely, given the current scholarly interest in maritime femininities and masculinities. Jo Stanley writes for general readers, hoping to engage them in her wider project and encouraging them to contribute insights and additional information. Her work is also ground-breaking. It is the first women’s maritime history that seeks to cover 250 years and to consider women’s roles in both the Royal and Merchant Navies. Stanley focuses primarily on the British experience but the breadth of her research is evident in her voluminous acknowledgements. The book is written in a personal style: the author’s own quest of discovery forming a parallel to the quest she attributes to many of her female subjects as they challenged societal norms and opted for a life at sea.
Stanley begins with a chapter on Britain’s ‘forgotten women seafarers’, first drawing attention to Susi Newborn, who crewed on Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in the 1970s. She compares Newborn’s daring to that of the two eighteenth-century female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Tried for piracy in 1721, these are probably the least forgotten female seafarers. Others mentioned in this chapter include a few cross-dressing women, some of whom served for long periods without discovery, and those who went to sea with their husbands. In the eighteenth century, most women seafarers were the wives of naval warrant officers, officially entitled to be on board. In the nineteenth century, the wives of whaling captains also braved long voyages, although this was largely an American and Australasian phenomenon. Such examples pose a useful context for Stanley’s central focus on waged females at sea.
Of the many stories this book uncovers, that of Thomas (alias Mary Anne) Walker neatly bridges those of women who went to sea dressed as men and those who later worked openly at sea, essentially as domestic servants. Their numbers increased as steam ships encouraged travel. Walker served as a steward for two years on Cunard ships in the 1860s, mostly taking emigrants to the United States. The marginalized world of a ship at sea, where social norms might be less rigidly imposed, was perhaps attractive to those who did not neatly fit into contemporary concepts of gender.
Women have only been allowed to serve at sea in the Royal Navy since 1991. Personnel shortages meant that, in the early days, women were allocated to take over tasks that were not gender-specific, like stores management. Today, about 3,000 women serve in the Navy on equal terms with men. (They have been allowed to sail on submarines since 2014.) Women are barred, on health terms, from only two fields: Mine Clearance Diver Branch and the Royal Marines Commando, although the use of women in other combat roles is still contentious.
The book devotes more time to the merchant navy. Women served in the merchant service as deck officers and radio officers from the late 1960s. Stanley has interviewed many women sailors and demonstrates a general trend of slowly improving conditions. It is no surprise that women met with male prejudice at institutional and personal level. More remarkable are descriptions of their affection for the sea and ships, ‘I loved their creaks and groans, the smell of rust and oil, the flaked paint’ (p. 32). The boxed accounts from different female seafarers form a lasting historical legacy.
Stanley gives a useful outline of the different roles on board a merchant ship, and those which are most open to women (few are bo’suns, carpenters or plumbers; only 0.5% of engineers at sea are women). She looks at what helps women seafarers overcome obstacles to success, which are mainly the same things that would benefit men: effective role models, mentors, relatives in the industry who can act as advocates, luck, and the right attitude.
The book is arranged both chronologically and thematically, with inevitable overlaps between the different sections. Later chapters treat in more detail aspects of the story introduced earlier, and then not always quite consistently. For example, we are told that, around 1800, Britain had possibly 200 women working at sea, and elsewhere that the number was probably fewer than 300. Chapters drawing on original research into the post-1918 period are much stronger. Stanley offers an insightful description of the changing social and economic conditions that made it possible for women to be accepted in deck jobs on British merchant ships. Ironically this occurred in a period of overall decline for British shipping.
Stanley offers an honest portrayal of prejudice and power struggles at sea. She does not romanticize women’s experience. A female chief engineer writes, ‘When I first went to sea I hated it. [. . .] What’s helped me to stay? The money is fantastic’ (p. 97). Stanley acknowledges that readers may even view the language used in the book as discriminatory: some wish to be known as seafarers rather than women seafarers. She bravely deals with all such issues in a transparent and pragmatic way.
The book is generously illustrated with black and white photographs. Terms are defined for a general audience, although repeated explanations in brackets are far from elegant and at least sometimes the academic buzz words could have been avoided altogether. There are useful appendices: a chronology of ‘selected landmarks’ in women’s seafaring history; a list of women who went to sea dressed as men, which will surely grow as readers contribute; a list of maritime-related organisations, such as the Sea Rangers and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, which offer sea experience; and a rather indulgent couple of pages on why ships have traditionally been referred to as ‘she’.
Stanley and others think that the male/female divide at sea will only slowly improve, despite family-friendly policies, with women becoming, at most, thirty per cent of seafarers. Yet women at sea are now a fixture, earning respect in their own right, as this book makes abundantly clear.