From Cabin ‘Boys’ to Captains: 250 years of women at sea

摘要

With the integration of women in the activeduty Royal Navy in the early 1990s, it seemed the UK had finally gained gender equity in the maritime workplace. Not so, concludes Jo Stanley in From Cabin ‘Boys’ to Captains: 250 Years of Women at Sea. Stanley finds that progress for women in the merchant navy and the Royal Navy has been decidedly mixed. While it is true that more women have taken to the waves in the past century, they still face discrimination and are far from half of the workforce. This lag was at one time thought to be due to perceived physical differences in terms of strength and stamina. However, technology has now by and large negated the dubious validity of such claims. Rather, it is slow-shifting social expectations about what women should or should not do that continue to limit what women can or cannot do on ships of all sorts.