ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A Natural History of Fishwives: Questions of Sex and Species along the Scottish Coast

• In Event: Revelations in Natural History

English Abstract

In July of 1859, the same year Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species, Charles Richard Weld, historian of the Royal Society, took a summer holiday to the Scottish Highlands and islands. In his resulting travel narrative, Weld details his encounters with the Scottish environment, customs, and people, including the Scottish herring girls – women who traveled south along the eastern coast of Scotland and England, following the herring shoals and the fishermen at sea, and processing the fish on land. In his short description of these fishwives – women he deems ambiguously gendered – Weld simultaneously invokes numerous urgent topics relevant to natural history in the mid-nineteenth century: questions of sex, species, evolution, monstrosity, and the boundaries of the human. This paper places Weld’s text within a larger discourse that posited a link between fishwives, on the one hand, and the sea and its creatures, on the other. Contemporaries – including naturalists and zoologists – constructed identities for women based on taxonomies gleaned from the annals of natural history. They looked to the natural world, and specifically to aquatic animals, fish, coral, barnacles, oysters, and the like, to make sense of the perceived sex and gender ambiguity of these women. In doing so, fishwives challenged their contemporaries to think and articulate identities and phenomena using a trans analytical framework – one heavily dependent on the language of natural history – in a period well before trans was recognized as a field of inquiry or a category of identity.

Author

• Dale Booth, Barnard College