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This dissertation, “Fluid Economies, Fluid Identities: Gender, Water and Work in Britain, 1750 – 1918,” brings together a social and economic history of women in the fishing industry, with an inquiry into scientific and popular discourses and understandings of sex, gender, and species. Women fish sellers are largely absent from histories of gendered labor and capitalism, yet they literally carried one of Britain’s most historically significant economies on their backs. They were at once a reminder of Britain’s longstanding dependence on the economies of the sea and an indicator of the startling potential of an economy significantly controlled by women, particularly along the eastern coastline of Scotland and England. In a period obsessed with the confines of categorization, fishwives themselves, and contemporary representations of them, dangerously transgressed and crossed borders.

“Fluid Economies, Fluid Identities” reconstructs the socio-economic world and everyday lives of women who worked in Britain's fishing industry from the mideighteenth century through to the start of WWI. Fishwives used both the family economy and capitalism to their advantage, enacting a substantial amount of control within their local sea-based microeconomies. Fishwives also carried with them multiple discursive meanings. Contemporaries constructed identities for women in the fisheries industrybased on taxonomies gleaned from the annals of natural history. Environment –specifically that of the sea and shore – shaped how contemporaries discussed, identified, and interacted with the women who drew their livelihoods from its depths. The women’s supposed affinity with the fish they sold led to contemporary concern over the “fishiness” – or strangeness – of both their gender and sexuality. The conflation of female flesh with fish both produced and disturbed the boundaries between human and animal, female and male, and natural and unnatural in ethnographic accounts, legal cases, and popular visual culture. By tracing the figure of fishwives in British and French satirical prints in the lateeighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, this dissertation demonstrates how the fluidity of fishwives’ identity seeped into the realm of the political as well.

Fishwives lived and labored at the borders of land and sea. This study underscores that their fluid crossings incited contemporaries to wrestle with and ask hard questions about taxonomies and hierarchies of gender, sex, and species ordering British society. By considering fishwives as complicated and contradictory figures, historians gain an understanding and appreciation for the rhetorical and material work that women undertook along Britain’s shores.

ETD_11278

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

External ETD doctoral

doi:10.7282/t3-gv51-xf91

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