Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.372950974485
EAN num: 9780807825617
ISBN number: 0807825611
Label: The University of North Carolina Press
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 392
Printing Date: October 16, 2000
Publishing house: The University of North Carolina Press
Release Date: September 27, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 1867048
Studio: The University of North Carolina Press
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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.
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While Lisa Norling certaintly did not write a book to change our times, she has written the best Ahab's wife book we have. Our only other real chioce seems to be Sena Jeter, and she is not an exeptional writer of any magnitude. So when choosing between the two, Lisa is the way to go.
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