The ideology of home—essentially the notion that "a woman's place is in the home"—
tends to shape the expectations and assumptions of both men and women regarding the
interests and abilities of women on the water. In "At Home Afloat: Gender and
Domesticity in Northwest Coast Marine Travel Accounts," I analyze those expectations
and their effects in a regional context. Reading accounts by female boat tourists between
1861 and 1990, I question the ways that gender influences the roles women play at sea,
the spaces they occupy on boats, and the language they use to construct their experiences,
their surroundings, and their contact with native peoples.
In this dissertation I show women—traditionally forbidden in marine environments
—participating in Northwest Coast steam tourism from its initiation, and influencing
steamship company promotional language. I trace a history of women who enter the
local recreational boating community and alter it with their home-making skills and their
demand for "houseboats," and I map how domestic ideology can divide the built space of
the boat into gender-specific territories. Women who labor in marine occupations
(fishers, towboaters) cope with the limitations of a "masculine" environment. My work
shows how female tourists, who typically cruise as "mates" with their captains/husbands,
cope with these same limitations while bearing the added responsibility of answering to
the patriarchal head of household; as a result, women who gain access to boats through
their domestic abilities can be "ghettoized" in the galley. This project hypothesizes that
"feminine discourse" (shaped by the Victorian cult of the home), together with the limitations of steamship transportation, led nineteenth-century female boat travellers to
portray native women as "counterfeit ladies" and to seek homescapes in the mixed
land/seascape. After the turn of the century-with the rise of the myth of the
disappearing Indian, and the growing popularity of small-boat cruising—female boat
tourists use feminine discourse to question their own position as outsider in the native
world. Finally, I show that although literary works rely on seascape metaphors to
symbolize woman's escape from the "social moorings" of gender expectations, these
travellers tend to depict themselves in traditional domestic roles and find the waterscape
largely "indescribable." Their accounts focus on "enfolding" nature into the ship's
household, and emphasize female connections to the land.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6143 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Pagh, Nancy |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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