At Home Afloat

Women on the Waters of the Pacific Northwest

By Nancy Pagh
Categories: Gender & Sexuality Studies, Women’s Studies, History
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Paperback : 9781552380284, 198 pages, March 2001
Ebook (PDF) : 9781552382882, 198 pages, March 2001

Table of contents

 

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Map

Chapter One
Northwest Coast Marine Tourism: A Contextual History
Gender and Regional Identity
Cruising and Steam Beginnings
Steam Tourism
The Gas Engine and Recreational Boating
Homemaking Tourists

Chapter Two
Space for the Mate: Superstition, Ritual, and a Woman’s Place
Space and Gender Politics
Floating Worlds
Women and Cruising Literature
Women and Boating on the Northwest Coast
Three Pleasure Craft Accounts
Three Work Boat Accounts

Chapter Three
Imaginary Indians: Feminine Discourse and Colonialism Afloat
Theorizing Colonial Women’s Travel Writing
Contacts
Counterfeit Ladies
The Victorian Cult of the Home
At Home in the Company of Strangers
A Sea Change

Chapter Four
"Getting Our Dresses Wet." Women, Girls and the Natural Environment
Home/Nature/Women
Indescribable Landscapes
Collectable Nature
"An Atavistic Female Instinct"
Daughters of the Coast

Bibliography

Index

 

Description

 

Considering accounts written by Northwest Coast marine tourists between 1861 and 1990, Nancy Pagh examines the ways that gender influences the roles women play at sea, the spaces they occupy on boats, and the language they use to describe their experiences, their natural surroundings, and their contact with Indigenous peoples.

Nancy Paugh, an accomplished marine tourist and scholar, offers an engaging text that makes fresh and relevant links between diverse areas of inquiry including Western Canadian Western Canadian and American history, feminist geography, post-colonial theory, and women and environments. She seamlessly integrates her own personal narrative into the text and beautifully evokes the complexity and singular qualities of Northwest Coast geography and ecology.

 

Reviews

 

The work is a mistress-piece of lean and personable prose. It will set the precedent for all future books on the social/spatial place of women at sea.

—Jo Stanley, Gender and History

 

 

Nancy Pagh has altered the course of nautical traditionalism with her book . . . At Home Afloat is a lively, intelligent analysis of, if you will forgive the pun, heretofore uncharted waters.

—Lorna Hutchinson, Canadian Literature