Navigating Mobility: Gender, Class, and Space at Sea, 1760–1810

This article examines the relationship between gender, class, & space during the closing decades of the “Age of Sail” (1760–1810). Using onboard diaries of male and female Quaker itinerant ministers, it explores the relationships between cabin and steerage passengers as well as those between passengers, captain, and crew. It argues that many passengers attempted to recreate the gendered and classed divisions observed on land as a way of engineering stability and security—two feelings lost to the disorientation of a transatlantic voyage. Thus, far from being a space of exception, life at sea proved to replicate and reinforce the social space of land.