Review of: Enterprising Women and Shipping in the nineteenth century, Helen Doe, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2009

This book is another keystone in the bridge constructed in recent years by researchers keen to lead us across the chasm to a fuller history of work than that left to us by the majority male body of work on the subject. It is now becoming obvious that women have worked in a far wider range and depth of occupations than previously thought. Doe’s detailed survey of five smaller seaports of the period has unearthed a mass of information about women’s involvement in owning, managing and even constructing ships in the heyday of that most masculine-seeming world of the wooden-walled sailing ship.