During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whaling industry in New England sent hundreds of ships and thousands of men to distant seas on voyages lasting up to five years. In Captain Ahab Had a Wife , Lisa Norling taps a rich vein of sources--including women's and men's letters and diaries, shipowners' records, Quaker meeting minutes and other church records, newspapers and magazines, censuses, and city directories--to reconstruct the lives of the ""Cape Horn widows"" left behind onshore. Norling begins with the emergence of colonial whalefishery on the island of Nantucket and then follows the industry to mainland New Bedford in the nineteenth century, tracking the parallel shift from a patriarchal world to a more ambiguous Victorian culture of domesticity. Through the sea-wives' compelling and often poignant stories, Norling exposes the painful discrepancies between gender ideals and the reality of maritime life and documents the power of gender to shape both economic development and individual experience. |A social history that uncovers the lives of maritime women in New England villages whose men were whalers during the 18th and 19th centuries. Norling draws from a variety of sources--including women's and men's letters and diaries, shipowners' records, church records, newspapers and magazines, censuses, and city directories to uncover the women's often poignant and painful stories.

From the voyage of the Argonauts to the Tailhook scandal, seafaring has long been one of the most glaringly male-dominated occupations. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Margaret Creighton, Lisa Norling, and their co-authors explore the relationship of gender and seafaring in the Anglo-American age of sail. Drawing on a wide range of American and British sources--from diaries, logbooks, and account ledgers to songs, poetry, fiction, and a range of public sources--the authors show how popular fascination with seafaring and the sailors' rigorous, male-only life led to models of gender behavior based on "iron men" aboard ship and "stoic women" ashore.

Yet "Iron Men, Wooden Women" also offers new material that defies conventional views. The authors investigate such topics as women in the American whaling industry and the role of the captain's wife aboard ship. They explore the careers of the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, as well as those of other women--"transvestite heroines"--who dressed as men to serve on the crews of sailing ships. And they explore the importance of gender and its connection to race for African American and other seamen in both the American and the British merchant marine. Contributors include both social historians and literary critics: Marcus Rediker, Dianne Dugaw, Ruth Wallis Herndon, Haskell Springer, W. Jeffrey Bolster, Laura Tabili, Lillian Nayder, and Melody Graulich, in addition to Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling.