Women on the Waves: Disguised Work and Gendered Geographies in the Nordic 1700s-1800s

This project adds a fresh outlook on maritime history, history of maritime labour, and expectedly male maritime geographies, by writing a new Nordic history based on hidden, forgotten female actors who during the 1700s-1800s worked in military and merchant fleets disguised as male sailors.The overall purpose of this project is to examine how this under-researched niche of Nordic labour can be understood as, a social practice, and, as a discursive representation.

By activating newly digitized Nordic newspaper data with the theoretical focus on class, work, and gender, the project can make a long, systematic study to unveil individuals and the hidden practice.

It will augment the understanding and create thicker biographical descriptions through enquiries into associated physical archives, and through qualitative text, genre, narrative, and discourse analyses.

Research is conducted over 3-years and will generate 3 academic articles, 1 popular article, seminars, presentations and sessions at congresses, a workshop, GIS visualisations and a public webpage.The project will break with methodological nationalism and bring a small-state, Nordic perspective to the global maritime discussion.

It will augment understandings of how individuals from the bottom of class and gender hierarchies reacted and acted upon societal and maritime changes, of labour migration from land to sea, and about a secluded niche of female provision and work.