Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870

by Lisa Norling

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whaling industry in New England sent hundreds of ships and thousands of men to distant seas on voyages lasting up to five years. In Captain Ahab Had a Wife , Lisa Norling taps a rich vein of sources--including women's and men's letters and diaries, shipowners' records, Quaker meeting minutes and other church records, newspapers and magazines, censuses, and city directories--to reconstruct the lives of the "Cape Horn widows" left behind onshore.

Norling begins with the emergence of colonial whalefishery on the island of Nantucket and then follows the industry to mainland New Bedford in the nineteenth century, tracking the parallel shift from a patriarchal world to a more ambiguous Victorian culture of domesticity. Through the sea-wives' compelling and often poignant stories, Norling exposes the painful discrepancies between gender ideals and the reality of maritime life and documents the power of gender to shape both economic development and individual experience.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Womens, School

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Lisa Norling is an American historian specializing in maritime history, with a focus on gender, race, and class in seafaring labor, passengers, and port cities. She earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and teaches at the University of Minnesota. She is also affiliated with the Frank C. Munson Institute and the USS Constitution Museum.

Reviews

[Sonya · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book for learning very detailed accounts of what middle-class women did while their husbands/fathers/sons went "a-whaling" during the 18th and 19th centuries. (However, I found it helpful to have read another book about whaling in general first.) Norling only covers the prime time of the whaling industry without going to much into why it stopped around 1870 and how it affected the women (and men). I would also have liked to know more about divorces or remarriage. When could a woman remarry if her husband had gone to sea and was gone for years (never knowing if he would return)? And if a husband came back and found his wife remarried, what happened? A look at the poorer sailors would have been good too, even though I realize this portion of the population is much harder to study. A lot of her focus was on the middle-class and of the wives of the captains. Would the ship owners, families, and social circles have been as supportive of the "regular" sailors?

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

the book is comprehensive as fuck. Norling did extensive research to write this. It is a good read if you are at all interested in understanding what the east coast/Atlantic seaboard communities were like over a span of 150 years when america was young. The voices of women tell a different story than what you are used to.

[Jude · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, if clunky, look at the role of women in the whaling trade.

[Lucy DeWitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish goodreads let us do half stars but alas…I’d give this book 3.5⭐️ and here’s why:

Lisa Norling’s Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery 1720-1870 positions itself as a corrective to the overwhelmingly masculine framing of maritime history. Rather than centering the whalemen themselves, Norling attempts to reframe the New England fishery through the women whose labor, emotional endurance, economic decision-making, and community presence made deep-sea whaling possible. In this way, the book directly engages with New England maritime history by exposing the gendered foundation of an industry usually portrayed as exclusively male.

However, after reading the introduction and the first four chapters, this gendered reframing was delayed and required some teasing out. Despite the book’s title and its promise to foreground women, the opening chapters are dominated by the economic, social, and religious history of Nantucket and its whaling. Norling presents this beautifully: her explanation of Quaker ideology, land-based labor systems, and the rise of deep-sea whaling is clear and valuable. But these chapters focus heavily on the whaling industry itself rather than the women within it. As a reader approaching the book for insight into women’s experiences, precisely because those perspectives have been marginalized in maritime narratives, I found myself waiting for those women to appear. Norling’s contextual foundation is thorough; I cannot discount that, but it comes at the cost of delaying the very perspective that is supposed to set her book apart.

What makes Captain Ahab Had a Wife distinctive, and what warrants closer attention, are the moments when Norling turns to the women whose voices and labor have been overshadowed in traditional narratives. Even though these perspectives emerge more slowly and require closer analysis than the book’s premise suggests, they remain the most compelling aspect of Norling’s book.

All in all, Norling's book offers us an interesting perspective on what it meant to be a whaler's wife, sister, mother, or daughter. Throughout her book, Norling reveals a world in which women simultaneously exercised autonomy and endured profound loneliness, managing households and communities while being excluded from the very narrative that defined maritime life. Although this book requires more interpretive effort than expected, and at times buries women’s voices beneath layers of contextual material, the moments when those voices emerge are undoubtedly powerful. Norling’s work ultimately contributes to essential nuance to New England maritime history by demonstrating that the whalefishery was not solely a story of men at sea but also of the women whose labor, emotions, and resilience made that world possible.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first impression of the book was that both the writer and the character took themselves a little too seriously but then I think Norling may have been mimicking the style of Melville. I don't know this for sure though as its been a long time since I read Moby Dick.
Its an interesting fast paced story until the last 100 pages at which point I was sick of the protaganist and just wanted to be done with it.

[M.P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the lives of whaling captains' wives, both at home and at sea.