Emigrant Stewardesses
Liberty by sea
Women can be particularly difficult to trace in history because they so rarely appear in written records. Their work was often domestic or informal and, therefore, often undocumented. According to historian Margaret S. Creighton, it is hard to dispute the "maleness" of merchant vessels (Creighton, 195). The image of the merchant vessel as a male dominated workplace reflects the real division of labour that existed at sea. It reflected : human decisions, more specifically those of the shipowners (197).
Women do appear in the MHA's Crew Agreements and Official Logs. Women went to sea for a wide range of reasons: some worked as stewardesses on passenger liners, while others travelled as tourists or emigrants. Birth and marriages sometimes took place aboard ship, and when they did, the master had to record the name of the mother or wife in his log. It was also not uncommon for masters who suffered from homesickness to ask the ship owners to let them take their spouses to sea.
Women may have been made by social and cultural constructions into "strangers" to the culture of the sea for gendered reasons, but they were also sea-workers. It is true that there were stewardesses who earned a regular wage in their employment, but other "stewardesses" were women who engaged at 1s per-month and were thus likely working their passage. Among the fifty-person crew of the passenger liner Kastalia, travelling from England to the United States in June 1920, there were five women: Emily Leigh Douglas, Maria Phillips Roberts, Cornelia Brookfield, Isabella MacDonald, and Elizabeth Lockwood, all engaged on their first ship (ON 141923, 1920, MHA). Work done by women in the Victorian and Edwardian periods was generally considered inferior to that done by men. Pay for stewardesses, for instance, remained low, from between from between £2. 10 and £3 a month (Riche, 36). For Douglas, Brookfield and Phillips, their wages were even lower at 1s per-month. Merchant ships often carried a small number of emigrants who paid their way across the North Atlantic with their labour. Douglas, Brookfield and Philips probably never made the return journey to England – they disembarked in North America
