This article explores the historical understanding of maritime womanhood in Newfoundland by examining women in fishing families along the southern Avalon Peninsula from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It does not talk about fishwives in any popular sense of the word, for these women did not market fish; rather, they produced salt fish for market. And while middle-class observers may have perceived them as coarse and bold, within their own families and fishing communities they were seen as essential partners who contributed equally to family economies. Within a sexual division of labor that assigned vital and complementary tasks to both men and women, Newfoundland fish(-producing) wives carried out hard physical labor at public sites of production. This contributed significantly to the construction of “woman” as essential worker, which in turn had broader repercussions for their status and authority within fishing communities. The participation of fish(-producing) wives changed significantly from the 1950s onward, as the fishery moved from household production to a modernized, and discursively masculinized, industry. Yet the iconic image of the fish(-producing) wife in traditional household production remains undisrupted in the early twenty-first century.
Throughout the controversy over Newfoundland sealing in the latter twentieth century, anti-sealing protest and counter-protest movements, government policy, the media, and the broader arena of international opinion all became sites for the creation of knowledge about Newfoundland sealing masculinity. Sealers engaged with these various discourses as they negotiated their own masculine identities. Recent interviews with sealers of the period reveal the complexity of this process. Not surprisingly, they challenged negative portrayals by their environmentalist critics. More intriguingly, they often positioned themselves outside a Newfoundland cultural narrative of “jolly ice-hunters” and undaunted heroes of the ice- floes. This article explores the disconnect between a romanticized, static cultural understanding of sealing masculinity and the more grounded, nuanced masculinity articulated by sealers and their local communities.
By charting various manifestations of Irish republican sympathy in Newfoundland from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century, this chapter highlights the historical memory of grievance among the Newfoundland Irish. The Fenian scare of the late 1860s in Port de Grave, Conception Bay provides the starting point for a wide-ranging survey that extends from elite concern over Ribbonism among early Irish Catholic settlers in the Avalon Peninsula to sympathy for the 1916 rebellion among their descendants. The chapter argues that while most Newfoundland Irish were not explicitly republican, expressions of sympathy with the goals of Irish republican movements reveal that many were not supporters of the British Empire.
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