Seawomen of Iceland: Survival on the Edge by Margaret Willson (review)

He masterfully skippered the big fishing trawlers. She was only cooking in the galley below. Or she just went catching local lumpfish. Or she was just a servant, not real crew. Or she was not there much. Or was not there in significant numbers. So go the gendered stereotypes about the Icelandic women who for centuries were "fishermen"—although they were never accepted by their male shipmates, especially in south and west Iceland, such as in the Breiðafjörðu Bay area.

Margaret Willson's book looks at the past and present of women's extraordinary but fluctuating penetration of what was once the most fishing-focused country in the world, where people who fished were second in status only to the great warriors of the sagas. She writes of how fishing women loved the job even when struggling in the Arctic at–20°F, of women who were and are proud of being such creative survivors in a tough, masculine, and essential occupation.

Seawomen of Iceland not only contributes very important material about Icelandic women, in English, to maritime history, fishing history, women's history, and Nordic studies, but these are also some of the most engrossing and entrancingly written pages I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Beautiful lines abound. For example, Willson questions why modern fishing women do it at all given that they are so rejected: "Does the history of ancestor seawomen, a tradition they do not even consciously remember, run as a memory through their veins? Is their determination nurtured through growing up alongside stark mountains, lichen-clad valleys and ever-moving fjords?" Willson answers that her interviewees certainly talked that way. Why? "Fishing was central… to the identity and economy of… the country as a whole; they wanted to be part of it. … The seawomen spoke in practicalities, laughing… [but] their perseverance and spirit slip through their words almost as loose seagrass slips through water, turning their struggles and solitary paths into stories of exploit, determination and sometimes even subterfuge" (p. 116).

Willson is a US anthropologist—who could also be a poet. Very interestingly she interpolates herself as researcher, woman, sometime fishing person (in Tasmania she deck-handed on a shark gillnetter, then dived for abalone from cowboy skiffs), and foreign traveler. So this is not just a work of history or anthropology. It is also almost a women's road movie (she tracked down her Facebook-made contacts with anthropologist and former fishing woman Birna Gunnlaugsdóttir, her specialist interpreter, by her side in a little car on winding lanes behind dunes), a partial memoir, and a delightful and profound reflection on all the telling aspects of another country's key economic enterprise, the myths surrounding it, and women's interface with that.

Her research began with her discovery of the winter fishing hut of Thurídur Einarsdóttir, one of Iceland's greatest fishing captains (1777–1863). Willson then followed a quest for Thurídur Einarsdóttir's many successors: those fishing women who were said not to exist. Surprisingly, Willson found information on many of them. Her book ends with a study of why today there are so few women in Icelandic fishing today and how the job has become so very different.

This book may be principally seen as a history of maritime women's work and lives. And it is tempting to excitedly review it alongside the rare others in the genre. Only seven books are in the (comprehensive, believe me) fishing section of my Seagoing Women bookshelves. (The first was published in 1988 and was very pioneering.) Authors include Captain Linda Greenlaw on swordfish fishing in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Leslie Leyland Fields on Alaskan women, and a global anthology edited by Jane Nadel-Klein and Dona Lee Davis. Edited collections on saltwater women generally, including those in fishing, exist too: Dee Pignéguy and Vickie Jensen include sections on fishing women. Hanna Hagmark-Cooper has written...