Workshop Program

April 29 - May 1

Maritime History Archive, MUN

Full in-person Program

Online Program

Newfoundland Women & Stories

Wednesday, April 29

8:30AM - Arrival at Maritime History Archive, MUN

8:45 - Welcome to MUN and the MHA from SWAAN Leader Dr. Julia Stryker

9:00 - Session 1.1

There is nothing novel in acknowledging the crucial role played by gadus morhua in Newfoundland and Labrador’s colonial history. But, there is some compelling insight to be gleaned from thinking through the multispecies entanglements of Atlantic cod and settler women in this history. As I engage with the archive of the Labrador floater fishery from 1850-1950, it becomes apparent that attempts by colonial authorities to prohibit women and girls’ participation in this important, yet unruly, seasonal enterprise centered around anxieties over their moral corruption. Such anxieties reflect what Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani discuss as imperial “concerns about […] forms of affection that potentially threatened prevailing racial orders” (Animalia, p.10) which were part of larger taxonomic projects delineating human/non-human hierarchies.
Much of the “trouble” with this research is with finding adequate material in archives. Women’s lives in the floater fishery are not well documented, and evidence of their work at sea is fragmented. My presentation at the SWAAN workshop will detail my findings thus far and expand on my published chapter “Salt Fish Maids: Untold Stories of Gender and Sex in the Labrador Floater Fishery.” Further, it will outline what new materials I have uncovered since that publication, how I am trying to weave together various archival fragments using the theoretical tools outlined above, and thus “trouble” the dominant narrative of the sea as a male domain.
Vicki S. Hallett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Memorial University. Her research interests include the co-constitution of place and identity through life narratives, archival serendipity, and historical silences. She is Vice-President of the NL Historical Society and in 2024, served as interim Academic Editor at Memorial University Press.

9:45 - Break in MHA Foyer

10:00 - Session 1.2

As a longtime resident of Exeter, in the Westcountry of England, I was shocked to discover that the maritime history of Devon and Cornwall has only been vaguely covered within historiography and the participation of women limited to two or three sentences in local history textbooks. My PhD thesis ‘Along the Shoreline: Women’s roles in the early modern maritime economy of the West Country’ seeks to address this imbalance of maritime and gender history and establish that women were very much active, and the backbone of maritime communities. Using probate documents, petitions and leases, this study has begun to demonstrate the vital roles of Devonshire women on a globalized scale, presenting their hard work and domestic labor in fishing households that participated in the Newfoundland fishing industry between 1500-1750. Whilst my research initially began to localise the gendered maritime history of Devon, it quickly expanded to incorporate the beginnings of colonization of local people and grander scales of international trade, whilst actively showing women as participating.
Zara Money is a second year PhD student and a postgraduate teaching associate at the University of Exeter. Her thesis is being supervised by James Davey and Jane Whittle; and is being funded by the Economic Social Research Council. She holds a MA in Naval History from the University of Portsmouth and a BA from the Open University. During her MA she worked as a researcher with the Wellington Trust to present a display of women’s work from 1840 onwards.

10:45 - Break in MHA Foyer

11:00 - KEYNOTE ADDRESS

This talk considers the stories of three Beothuk women from what we call the island of Newfoundland, who lived and died in the years between 1780 and 1829. It explores how thinking with water might help illuminate their lives and expand the way we think about maritime history.
Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. She publishes widely in gender and women’s history, the history of migration and labour, and historical methodology. Her new book project will tell the story of the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit, the dilettante ethnographer William Eppes Cormack, and her own Newfoundland ancestors.

12:00PM - Lunch in MHA Foyer and Toulinquet Square (Weather Permitting)

2:00 - Session 1.3

A newer accession to the MHA pertains to one of the Working Men Who Got Wet, but not as a case of William Barnes’s (b.1850, d. 1933) number having come up. The turn we take is instead to Depression era New York. Estranged from his family, in professionally and materially reduced circumstances, the power of Barnes’s storytelling was failing. It took a meeting with a well-connected and socially-aware intellectual to bring his unorthodox autobiography to print on both sides of the Atlantic. The publishers of the British edition – the only one then known to Barnes’s historians – erased her scant details. With the name of Hilda Renbold Wortman (b.1899, d.1992) provided in the US edition, Walker was moved to consider the gendering of the conditions under which experiences and interpretations become “historical.” Repatriated to St John’s in 2011, the bricolage of Barnes life and Wortman’s editorial labours were laid out in the Archive. Safety-pins and sewing needles held his jottings together and the last remaining Dictaphone wax-cylinder on which we understood Barnes had continued speaking his life: Wortman ensured his stories endured. Historians apprised that beyond this shipmaster’s autobiography there exists an historically layered and shape-shifting archive and might now examine the complexity of the interaction between social and gender relations in respect of the historical contingencies of the maritime world’s naturalized divisions of material and cultural labour.
Valerie Burton has pursued a long-standing career as researcher, journal editor, award-winning teacher, and public historian on two sides of the North Atlantic. Canada’s attraction was the massive holdings of nineteenth-century British imperial merchant seafarers’ documents at the Maritime History Archive. A close knowledge of them has given her always-evolving project “Spanning Sea and Shore” a critical edge which has in turn primed her theoretical and methodological contributions to equity-seeking scholarship. Now based in England, her research into port communities continues alongside the encouragement provided to early career scholars as a co-organizer of the “New Horizons” workshops.
Meaghan Walker is an independent scholar in St. John’s, NL, who specializes in men’s clothing, specifically in maritime menswear and ready-made working-class clothing. She has worked routinely with the Maritime History Archive on research and outreach, including her role in digital outreach pedagogy More than a List of Crew and the Maritime History Workshops. Besides confirming that men indeed wear clothes, her work takes seriously the role of women as garment manufacturers, both as piece-work contractual labourers and as unpaid household logisticians.

2:45 - Break in MHA Foyer

3:00 - Archival Workshop 1

The Maritime History Archive was created to host the bulk of the British government’s Crew Agreements collection saved from destruction in the 1960s. These documents form the basis for one of the earliest Canadian cliometric studies, the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project. In the process of this work and as a maritime archive in Newfoundland and Labrador, the MHA came to acquire and manage multiple local merchant, fisherman’s union, newspaper, photographic, and bureaucratic collections that relate to the maritime activity in the province.

4/5PM (TBA) - Return to ALT Hotel

Women’s Labour & Danger at Sea

Thursday, April 30

8:30AM - Arrival at Maritime History Archive, MUN

9:00 - Session 2.1

There is nothing novel in acknowledging the crucial role played by gadus morhua in Newfoundland and Labrador’s colonial history. But, there is some compelling insight to be gleaned from thinking through the multispecies entanglements of Atlantic cod and settler women in this history. As I engage with the archive of the Labrador floater fishery from 1850-1950, it becomes apparent that attempts by colonial authorities to prohibit women and girls’ participation in this important, yet unruly, seasonal enterprise centered around anxieties over their moral corruption. Such anxieties reflect what Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani discuss as imperial “concerns about […] forms of affection that potentially threatened prevailing racial orders” (Animalia, p.10) which were part of larger taxonomic projects delineating human/non-human hierarchies.
Alexandre Yingst is an anthropologist, marine biologist and PhD student at the University of Iceland whose current project focuses on what life is like onboard cruise ships for crew. This had resulted in studies of how crew help newcomers adapt to life onboard, something that is particularly important for women and sea, as well as examining the how gender affected crew response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This project builds on her Master’s work about the women involved in fisheries in Iceland today, both ashore and at sea. Yingst works aboard cruise ships as an expeditionary guide and is a boat driver for the Icelandic Orca Project.

9:45 - Break in MHA Foyer

10:00 - Session 2.2

In October 1747, a group of French passengers were taken prisoners by two British privateers owned by a Bristol merchant. The passengers were four sisters, one of whom was described as “a Mulatto lady likewise a sister to them,” accompanied by a female guardian, a maid servant, a male cook, and a male “friend.” During the capture, one sister was wounded and later died, while another lost a leg; the remaining passengers were unscathed. Transported to Cork, the survivors awaited permission to return to France and were, in the interim, held as prisoners of war (Kew, ADM 98/4, 27 Nov 1747).
Taking this episode as its point of departure, this paper examines the experiences of women captured at sea during the Anglo-French wars of the eighteenth century. Although civilians, especially women and children, were not formally designated prisoners of war, they were frequently taken into custody until official clearance was granted. Strained communication networks and mounting pressure on the Navy’s Sick and Hurt Board, which also administered prisoners, meant such detention could be prolonged and uncertain. Despite the frequency of such encounters, the experiences of female naval captives remain largely absent from the historiography of maritime warfare. Drawing on naval correspondence, prize records, and administrative papers, this paper investigates the lived experiences of women held captive through naval warfare. In doing so, it recentres women as maritime actors whose mobility, vulnerability, and confinement were shaped by the fiscal-military state. The paper contributes to women’s maritime history by revealing how naval war produced forms of gendered captivity that unfolded in European ports, prisons, and bureaucratic systems of control.
Eliska Bujokova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She specialises in the history of care and welfare across geographies of the British Empire in the long eighteenth century. She is particularly interested in the interplay between capitalism, social reproduction, and labour. She is currently developing her postdoctoral research into a monograph entitled Caring at Sea: Naval Welfare in the British Atlantic Empire, c.1700–c.1780. Constructing a transcolonial history of naval welfare, Caring at Sea, will offer a new lens on eighteenth-century imperial statecraft by investigating how diverse reproductive infrastructures underpinned and facilitated colonial naval power.

10:45 - Break in MHA Foyer

11:00 - Session 2.3

This paper focuses in particular on violence “within the ranks” and against vulnerable categories of seafarers largely invisible within the archival records--captive and imprisoned girls and women, enslaved people, ships’ boys, and others and seeks to build on important recent work by Elaine Murphy on maritime sexual crime and to respond to calls by Elizabeth Heineman and others to attend to sexual violence outside of immediate conflict zones as an essential, but often overlooked, side of the history of wartime sexual violence. Joanna Bourke’s pioneering scholarship on the history of rape, particularly Rape (2007) and Disgrace (2022), as theoretical and methodological guides helps uncover the many ways in which these forms of violence were “hidden”--from naval authorities’ refusal to use courts martial to police crimes against girls and women to navy clerks mislabeling disciplinary files to a persistent historiographical reticence to confront sexual misconduct by Britain’s tars. While early feminist works such as Evelyn Berckman’s The Hidden Navy (1973) explored women’s sexual vulnerability at sea, particularly among sex workers, the important body of women’s maritime history that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s largely avoided the topic. So too has the more recent literature on maritime masculinities. Even the more limited scholarship on male homosexuality in the navy had often failed to fully appreciate the scope of sexual abuse of young (male) sailors--despite the fact that, unlike crimes against girls and women, there is a huge body of surviving trial records documenting frequent and normalized abuse of ships’ boys. My reconstruction of the history of abuse of young male sailors on navy ships draws on extensive research into the navy sodomy trials, and I believe it is the first account to approach this phenomenon as both child sexual abuse and sexual violence within the ranks. I believe strongly in the potential for pre-modern sexuality, gender, and queer history to inform how we approach our own futures today.
Description text goes I am an Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College. I study medicine, gender, and sexuality, with particular focus on early modern Europe and European imperialism and colonialism. My current research focuses on the queer age of sail. I am the editor of the historical source collection Sexual and Gender Difference in the British Navy, 1690-1900 (Routledge, 2024), and I am completing work on a queer history of the British Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.here

11:45 - Lunch in MHA Foyer at Toulinquet Square (weather permitting)

1:45PM - Session 2.4

Part of my current SSHRC-funded research project involves an examination of seventeenth-century parish records from the island of Faial (Azores Archipelago). The island had several parishes by that time, but my focus is on Flamengos, a community established by the Flemish in the fifteenth century, though the island of Faial was by then under Portuguese rule. Flamengos is of particular interest because of the existence of a relatively complete set of baptism registries spanning nearly twenty-seven years (1661-1687), whereas the same types of registries from other communities are commonly more fragmented. Flamengos is also unique in the number of registries that deal with racialized/enslaved individuals, and my presentation will highlight the case of Bernarda, a woman who was noted on eight separate entries, as the enslaved mother of eight baptized infants. A discussion of the circumstances of Bernarda’s life allows for the inclusion of women of marginalized identities in maritime spaces. Indeed, she experienced firsthand the consequences of the development of maritime spaces in the early modern period. She was a product of maritime expansion writ large, as Portugal claimed new lands and depended on the African slave trade to supply workers for the conquered territories. We know little else about Bernarda, and the records do not provide any detail about the nature of her work. This was not unusual for the time, however, for sources from pre-modern Europe are notorious for ignoring women’s economic occupations, referring more often to women as the wife or daughter of, labels that hid women’s fundamental contributions to the household economy. Bernarda may never have been engaged in a conventional maritime occupation, but it is very possible that occasionally her eyes swept across the vast Atlantic Ocean before her, wondering about the trek that brought her to that isolated maritime community.
Dr. Darlene Abreu-Ferraira researches the history of early modern Europe, with a specialty in women in pre-modern Portugal, as well as the history of crime, gender, race, children, and slavery in pre-modern Europe. Currently she is working on the history of women and children of African descent in pre-modern Portugal (funded by a research grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), 2018-2023.

2:30 - Break & Walk to QEII Library

3:00 - Archival Workshop 2

A visit to the MUN Library’s collection to explore records on Newfoundland and Labrador women and their experiences.

5:00 - Return to ALT Hotel

BONUS Evening Events (Not Affiliated with SWAAN)

7:30 - NLHS George Story Lecture by Dr. Sean Cadigan at MUN A-1043 (Arts & Admin Bldg), Free

8:00 - Song/Ballad Circle at the Crow’s Nest (at the War Memorial), $5 Cover

Maritime Economic & Emotional Labour

Friday, May 1

8:30AM - Arrival at Maritime History Archive, MUN

9:00 - Session 3.1

This research seeks to prove that women were actively engaged with Britain’s maritime economy and were significant players in the development of Britain’s global economy and rejects previous interpretations of capitalism as having a marginalising influence on the economic status of women. Instead, this work engages with more recent trends in the history of female labour, where women are increasingly presented as ‘changemakers’ and not simply the passive recipients of economic shifts determined by men. The study also speaks to developments in naval history, which has increasingly tilted research away from traditional histories of the British empire through grand victories and ‘great men’. As well as recognising the experiences of those of lower ranks, imperial history now embraces subaltern perspectives, meaning that more ethnically diverse histories are increasingly represented. Similarly, this study will recover the work of a different marginalised group, women, and connect their contributions to London’s maritime economy. However, this research sits at the centre of a growing rejection, championed by Exeter’s Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, of the dominant Marxist interpretation of maritime ‘history from below’, which has attempted to connect lower ranking sailors to revolutionary opposition. In contrast, this study argues that previously-neglected archives contain numerous examples of port-side women of all ranks who were drivers of capitalist enterprise, much more likely to seek out, create and gain from venture capitalism than they were to resist it as members of the ‘dispossessed’ seeking revolution. This thesis is exceptional in that it explores the under-represented economic influence of women in a maritime setting. Previous studies of port towns in history have predominantly presented the maritime world as strongly ‘homosocial’, with women referenced as only really featuring on the margins. When women have been researched, their academic positioning, as caregivers and caretakers, has underestimated the full impact of their contribution. This research provides an opportunity to move away from this narrative, where women exist on the periphery of economic life, and recognise them as key financial players in the development of London’s maritime economy.
Hannah Gibbons is a part-time PhD student at the University of Exeter. A gender historian of the eighteenth century, her research focus is women and trade in the port-side communities of London. Previous to this Hannah completed her undergraduate degree in History at Newcastle University and holds a Masters of Education from the University of Durham. When not researching, Hannah works as the Head of History at Dulwich College, London.

9:45 - Break in MHA Foyer

10:00 - Session 3.2

From an early age, Winnifred had been travelling, living on ships, and /or following ocean going vessels. As a daughter of a master mariner, she was born into a seafaring family, and as a wife of a master mariner, she continued this connection to sailing ships and introduced her children to life at sea. Margaret S. Creighton describes captain’s wives who went to sea as “daring.” These women moved themselves, their household belongings and sometimes their children into the ship’s aftercabins. Haskell Springer, noted that the practice of captain’s wives sailing on vessels commanded by their husbands began in the late eighteenth century and peaked in the late nineteenth or early twentieth. Writings about seafaring wives and their families, suggest that their experience while somewhat unique was common for its time. So why write about Winnifred and her seafaring family?
I inherited family photographs dating from the 1880s until the late 1920s, family correspondence, personal papers, artifacts, and stories, all related to seafaring families originating from Yarmouth, N.S. Hannah M. Lane identifies a newer historical writing: “historical monographs built from the authors’ own families, personal papers, and oral histories.” For me, it is personal; it is about the historic context of these stories, exploring themes within larger frameworks, and opening new avenues for historical study. Of particular interest is the perception and meaning of home. For Winnifred, home was a sailing ship. When she was not aboard ship, she and her family set up residence in various ports in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. And the ancestral home at Chebogue Point, in Yarmouth County, N.S. was a place of refuge. Home and family were integral to each other; home was the place where family was.
Margaret J. Dixon is an independent scholar in Kingston, Ontario. Following a career in private and public archives, she has undertaken a number of independent research projects. Research interests include: the history and value of archives, building, assessing and facilitating access to collections, and archival and preservation practices; using bibliography in historical research to uncover an author’s identity, and the use of the web as a platform for bibliography; family linkages, economic development, and social networks; and the historical development of seaward and landward economies in Atlantic Canada.

10:45 - Break in MHA Foyer

11:00 - Session 3.3

The RN, the largest and most important institution in the British Empire, shaped the way we think about both the maritime world and British society. It was a socially distinct military institution and women who married naval officers experienced unusual lifestyles. These often-overlooked women provide a useful category of analysis for maritime, social, and gender historians. They laboured outside traditional gender roles and assumed responsibilities which land-based husbands would typically have fulfilled. This research investigates the unpaid, unacknowledged yet vital labour these women provided to both their husbands and, by extension, the Royal Navy. They built, sustained, and maintained relationships, playing a critical role in supporting sailors and their well-being. Naval wives also ran households, stepping into roles typically fulfilled by husbands and disrupting the idea that the maritime world is a homosocial space. They also did professional labour, provided a new archetype of martial femininity, using social capital to influence rank transference and manifesting feminine patriotism. The importance of this research in identifying and documenting historical concerns of naval life have critical applications for the modern maritime industry, which still impacts family systems in ways other work does not.
Lisa Wojahn, a Ph.D. student at the University of Exeter, is a social historian of the long-nineteenth century Britain focusing on the maritime world. Her current research documents the unusual lives of women who married officers of the Royal Navy. It incorporates elements from social, maritime, and gender history. She plans to submit her thesis in May of this year. Her love of maritime history began during her time at the US Coast Guard Academy and racing dinghies and yachts.

11:45 - Lunch in MHA Foyer at Toulinquet Square (weather permitting)

1:45PM - Session 3.4

By using the maritime household as a conceptual lens, this paper offers a critical reflection on what maritime history can contribute to debates on transformations in household organization and coping mechanisms during industrialization. While scholarship has challenged the dominance of the male breadwinner model (and its largely middle-class interpretation of European and American family life) and emphasized the diversity and flexibility of household forms, these debates remain largely grounded in land-based perspectives that assume spatial stability and wage rhythms structured around daily or weekly work. Focusing on households rather than individual family members, such as seamen’s wives, foregrounds how absence reorganized household economies and responsibilities. The cyclical absence and return of seafarers, payment systems concentrated at the end of voyages, and the mismatch between maritime labor rhythms and household life within port-city labor markets and neighborhood economies point to arrangements marked by mobility, disruptions to everyday household routines, and shifting gendered roles, which together underscore the usefulness of these ‘fluid households’ as a complementary concept to the male- and female-headed household models that dominate much of the historiography. By approaching maritime labor from a gendered perspective and conceptualizing occupational identities of household members in relation to practices of coping with prolonged absence and kinship ties, neighborhood relations, and networks of support, the paper seeks not only to demarginalize figures such as seafarers’ women, children, and other household members but also suggests that maritime households offer a compelling vantage point for rethinking how family economies and gendered responsibilities are conceptualized in key debates on family life during industrialization.
Dr. Kristof Loockx is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp. His research focuses on the impact of urbanisation, port development and mobility on maritime labour and port communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on Antwerp and Boston, MA. He is also co-coordinator of the Maritime Labour History Working Group (ELHN), co-research director at the N.W. Posthumus Institute and co-organiser of the Maritime History Workshops for early-career scholars.

2:30 - Transportation to the Rooms

3:00 - Archival Workshop 3

We will visit the provincial collection of Newfoundland and Labrador, housed at the beautiful and iconic Rooms at the edge of St. John’s harbour. The collection has government records and personal papers that showcase women’s work and political action in the province.

5:00 - Visit to the Rooms [admission provided]. The Rooms Café will be open.