Yearbook of Women’s History / Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis - 2025: Women and Ports

The establishment of European-style cities along the Atlantic seaboard of Colonial America positioned ports and wharves as central to the colonial economy. Unlike in England, where wharf ownership was often public or corporately managed, private ownership predominated in the colonies. Historians have long treated wharves as exclusively male spaces, yet this article demonstrates that women also owned and managed wharves in Colonial American port cities. Managing these properties required a blend of practical knowledge and commercial skill suited to the complexities of maritime enterprise. In the absence of male agents, female wharf owners worked within a labour force otherwise dominated by men. Focusing on the period before the American Revolution, this article examines women’s wharf ownership in Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources – especially newspaper advertisements – it reveals the economic strategies women employed and situates them within the broader commercial and urban frameworks of the Colonial Atlantic world. By foregrounding this overlooked evidence, the article challenges longstanding assumptions about gender and economic agency in early American port cities and offers a new perspective on women’s participation in maritime commerce.

This creative essay explores gender dynamics in the East German shipbuilding industry by reflecting on workers’ experiences through an autoethnographic lens. Using fictionalized dialogue inspired by oral history interviews with former shipyard workers, it examines the historical male dominance in shipbuilding and its association with masculinity. It highlights the marginalization of women in traditionally male roles, societal stereotypes, and systemic inequalities in pay and job opportunities. By blending personal reflection with academic analysis, the essay connects past gender issues in the socialist GDR and the early post-reunification years to contemporary debates on gender equality. Through this approach, the essay reveals the enduring influence of patriarchal structures while demonstrating how oral history and autoethnography can serve as powerful tools to explore historical experiences.

This contribution analyzes how, in the eighteenth century, the port of Genoa offered significant economic opportunities for women from lower social classes. Women managed inns, taverns, and lodging activities, and engaged in the sale of basic necessities, whose origins were not always legal. The exchange of goods with foreign sailors often intersected with the informal practice of prostitution, posing significant risks to personal safety. Additionally, the port area provided lucrative opportunities in the smuggling of foodstuffs. By studying criminal records produced by the magistrates overseeing the circulation of these goods, this study uncovers illegal supply and sale networks involving bread and wine. Some particularly enterprising women engaged in the retail sale of smuggled goods, using raw materials supplied by other women. Through the examination of criminal cases, this research reveals how the port functioned as a gendered space where women sought new earning opportunities in the shadow of city institutions.

Throughout the nineteenth century, boarding houses were a prominent feature of the urban landscape, reflecting the many demographic transformations occurring in the industrial cities of the Eastern United States. These establishments served not only as places of welcome and socialization, but also as recruiting grounds for maritime workers, particularly immigrants. For these individuals, naturalization provided a means of economic mobility and access to higher positions, such as captain or officer. Although women were initially a minority in the early part of the century, they became the most widely represented among boarding housekeepers in New Bedford from 1890 onwards. This article will analyse the role of these boarding house keepers – both men and women – in helping immigrants gain access to naturalization against the backdrop of the persistent debt-based recruitment of seafarers. Through an analysis of the individual career paths of immigrant women running “Portuguese” boarding houses, this review also highlights how some of them were actively involved in both the immigration and the recruitment of Portuguese seafarers as packet trade shipowners.

This article discusses with the Finnish entrepreneurial women whose livelihoods were thoroughly linked to the shipping business, but who worked on the continent and in the port and did not leave to the sea by themselves. At the same time, the article is also a biography of three women who lived on the island in the long nineteenth century and how the conditions and social changes affected their lives. These women belonged to different generations, but were connected by entrepreneurship and responsibility to take care of family’s livelihood. At the same time, the article deals more broadly with female entrepreneurship and shows how the port functioned as an enabler for women’s entrepreneurship. The article questions what kind of earning opportunities the port community offered women in the nineteenth century. The study takes place on the west coast of Finland, in the harbor community of Reposaari.

The article explores how imperial naval activity shaped conceptions of masculinity and femininity in the German naval port town of Wilhelmshaven at the turn of the twentieth century. In this period, discourses of empire and gender intersected with local dynamics, as the civic community increasingly identified as a ‘Navy City’. Male residents portrayed naval soldiers as embodiments of a reinvigorated German masculinity and appropriated this symbolism to define the city’s identity. Conversely, to affirm the soldiers’ supposed imperial virility and ‘German’ respectability, public discourse moreover projected complementary notions of femininity onto the women who interacted with the soldiers. This prompted Wilhelmshaven’s women to understand their own femininity in relation to Germany’s imperial expansion, sometimes along explicitly racial lines. Overall, the article argues that naval port towns were unique sites where abstract notions of empire and gender became tangible and localized through frequent interactions between the military and civilian spheres.