The Entangling Net: Alaska's Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (review)

Leslie Leyland Fields's title, The Entangling Net, is an apt metaphor for the role of women in fishing families and communities. Since people first snared fish for sustenance, women have been inextricably webbed in the activity: sometimes as fishers themselves, sometimes as builders of fishing gear or preparers of materials for building gear, sometimes as fish handlers, processors, preservers, or cooks, sometimes as fish marketers, mongers, or shippers, sometimes as fishing lobbyists and community activists, and sometimes as daughters, wives, or mothers of fishers, supporters and inculcators of distinctive kinds of working philosophies and skills. In recent decades, as women have pushed evermore into working arenas that have customarily been the domains of men, more have ventured into harder types of fishing activities, generally those requiring supreme strength and endurance, masterful technique, quickness and timing, nerves of steel, and an overriding desire to enjoy the challenges of very physical work in an awe-inspiring yet inhospitable environment. They have become fisherwomen, crew for some of the toughest kinds of offshore fishing in existence, and skippers of their own boats. They have had to be "twice as good" as men in the same positions, says fisherwoman Virginia Adams (p. 55).

Simultaneously, women, and a women's warp, have become more present in scholarly circles. During the 1980s, anthropologists, many of them women, meshed perspectives from maritime anthropology and women's studies to view women in fishing communities, and particularly women as fishermen. Jane Nadel-Klein and Dona Lee Davis published To Work and to Weep: Women in Fishing Economies in 1988 (Memorial University of Newfoundland Institute of Social and Economic Research), an outgrowth of a symposium held during the American Anthropological Association's 1983 meetings in Chicago. The collection of 14 essays spans the world and covers a range of fishing communities types and women's roles in them. Two essays, by editors Nadel-Klein and Davis, provide an insightful "Review of the Literature," discuss conceptual issues of "Gender in the Maritime Arena," and place the other essays in the volume in these contexts. As is common for folklorists searching written records for folkloristic material, Nadel-Klein and Davis "found a surprising amount of information available" regarding "women's contributions to life in fishing communities" but also discovered that "it tends to be scattered, diverse, and piecemeal, in many cases lacking either a clear theoretical focus or ethnographic coherence" (p. 19). They attribute the fleeting or undeveloped nature of much of this material partly to an androcentric bias in subject matter and scholarly perspective (p. 20), notably that fishing may very well be "perceived a priori as a male endeavor" (p. 30). They particularly rue, even among women ethnographers, the "male bias or emphasis on male activities to the virtual exclusion of female activities" in the participant- observation methodologies that have been used most often to look at fishing communities (p. 25).

While not responding specifically to the points raised by Nadel-Klein and Davis, Leslie Leyland Fields's Entangling Net sets its mesh on women as fisherwomen; moreover, it focuses on independent entrepreneurial fishers in one of the toughest industrialized commercial fishing environments in the world. Fields has been an active participant in this world for over two decades.

A poet and writer trained in English literature, Fields began a summertime commercial fishing career in 1978, when she married her husband and joined the family occupation of set gillnetting for salmon near Alaska's Kodiak Island. Not following the family model for women, she worked alongside her husband as crew, setting and lifting the nets, maneuvering the skiff, picking and delivering fish. With more experience, she eventually came to "man" the skiff and supervise crew; she also began to notice other women fishing, but in more independent and entrepreneurial roles than she found herself.

"That I would write something about women in...