Fishermen's wives: how unsung efforts keep a way of life afloat
In spring 2020, the fishing community of Newport, Oregon, shuttered along with the rest of the country. A coronavirus outbreak at a local Pacific Seafood processing plant left fishermen sitting on docks with no buyers for their Dungeness crabs, while restaurants closed and families found themselves housebound.
That’s when Taunette Dixon and her organization, the Newport Fishermen’s Wives, stepped in. This group quickly mobilized to provide food, supplies, infant formula, pet food, fuel cards, masks, gloves and money for past-due utility payments to fishing families who had been hit by the pandemic.
For 50 years, groups like Dixon’s have formed the behind-the-scenes backbone of their communities, often lobbying on behalf of their husbands, who leave for months at a time to fish.
In fishing towns where fishermen’s spouses stay onshore, fishermen’s wives associations have served as mutual aid groups, social support networks and political agitators. Dixon and her colleagues mend nets, keep books, care for families, fight for or against environmental regulations, navigate byzantine quota systems and act as onshore brokers communicating information to husbands out at sea.
Data about these women is scarce,
and there’s not much research quantifying exactly how much work they perform for the industry, but social scientists call their labor an “informal subsidy”. And yet, when policymakers talk about supporting fishermen, women like Dixon are often left out of the conversation. And at a local level, members of these groups say their individual efforts can go unnoticed or taken for granted.
“In a fishing family like mine, I do the management. I do payroll, I make sure we have our permits, I fill out all the red tape,” said Dixon. “I don’t think it’s recognized generally how much work women do in the industry. It’s changing but it has a long way to go.”
Some of these women receive payment for their administrative and organizing work by finding jobs at fishing-related non-profits or governmental agencies, while others don’t, and most are well-respected in their communities. But many say their organizations are still rankled by broader misconceptions about women in fishing and by casual misogyny.
“If somebody calls about some aspect of what’s going on on the boat, they’re always asking for my husband when it’s myself who’s going to give the answer,” said Dixon, who is co-president of the Newport group.” [People need to] realize that women can make good decisions in the fishing industry.”
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Fishing has always been a harsh, addictive pursuit, and the fishing industry has always been singular: it involves making a profit off creatures that dwell in a public resource, and as such, it’s often both highly regulated and contentious – just this season, fishermen in Newport joined their counterparts up and down the west coast to strike in protest of low prices for Dungeness crab. These days, the industry finds itself at a crossroads: battling climate change, which has altered currents, expelled species from their traditional breeding grounds and acidified the ocean, and Covid-19, which caused the lucrative export market for fish to collapse last spring.
While women do fish, especially in Alaska and on the west coast, there are plenty of reasons why women who marry fishermen or are born into fishing families may stay onshore. In some industries, such as lobstering, the exclusive licensing system favors the old boys’ club. In Massachusetts, the Italian and Portuguese immigrants who shaped the industry believed that women on boats brought bad luck.
“Traditionally we’re in a man’s world,” said Renée Gagne, who once worked as a commercial fisherman, and now works as a shellfish constable in Massachusetts, a town-appointed job that entails monitoring clam diggers to ensure they’re sticking to regulations. “There’s limited participation of women in the actual fishing part of it.”
And yet when a woman marries a fisherman, his career often transforms her life. “Becoming a fisherman’s wife is almost like marrying into the military, without the kudos,” said Suzanne Russell, a social scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Seattle. Fishing becomes the organizing principle of their family life.
Women who are born or marry into this world might support the family business by handling day-to-day tasks.
“There’s a lot of grinding and scraping and painting of boats,” Amber Taunton, Dixon’s co-president, said one November afternoon, after just coming in from painting buoys.
Others might take a governmental role like Gagne, work in a non-profit, design nets or run markets. But one of the most enduring ways in which women have supported the industry is through the fishermen’s wives groups. These organizations sometimes pop up to tackle a particular industry issue and then dissolve, but others remain in operation, gaining sway in their local community and becoming a force to be reckoned with. The Newport group, for example, started as a social club but transformed into a support and advocacy group for the local fishing economy. One example of their organizing was in 2014, when they successfully sued the Coast Guard over a plan to remove its search and rescue helicopter base from Newport, which the wives feared would imperil their seafaring husbands.
In Massachusetts, in another tightknit fishing community, the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association has taken on a political edge, shaping New England fishing since it was founded in 1969.
The group’s current president, Angela Sanfilippo, emigrated from Sicily to Gloucester when she was young, and by 1977, she was married to a fisherman, with two children. That year saw the enactment by the UN of the 200-mile limit, which established an exclusive economic zone for US fishermen. The downside was that they started catching too much, flooding the market.
Sanfilippo attended a meeting about this issue to translate for the fishermen, first-generation Italian immigrants, many of whom didn’t speak English, and found herself weighing in.
Since then, she and her fellow wives have asserted themselves as key decision-makers in the local fishing economy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they first secured a oneyear and then a 10-year moratorium on disruptive oil drilling on Georges Bank, fertile fishing grounds off the east coast. In 1993, they negotiated with environmental groups to preserve fishing rights in the Stellwagen marine sanctuary, crucial territory for Massachusetts fishermen.In 2008, they pioneered one of the nation’s first community-supported fishery boxes, Cape Ann Fresh Catch, to encourage consumers to eat different kinds of seafood.They opposed wind turbines on fishing grounds, facilitated safety training, erected a fishermen’s wives statue in their town.
“We were shore captains,” said Sanfilippo. “We would make sure when the boats came in, they’d get everything they needed so they could go back out the next morning at 2.30. The wife would be responsible to make sure these things happened. As their wives, we knew more than them.”
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Overlooking women’s work has a long history, said sociologist Erin Hatton, who studies gender and labor at the University at Buffalo. She calls this the gender lens: work done by women is coded and perceived as unessential, not as real labor. One famous historical example, said Hatton, stems from the garment industry: women were considered to have nimble fingers, and so their aptitude with sewing was considered natural and biological, not skilled work that should be fairly compensated.
Discourse around women’s socalled natural affinity for parenting and nurturing also falls into this category, said Hatton. Because the wives’ work focuses as much on individuals’ needs in their community as it does on the broader conditions of the fishing industry, their contributions to the local economy can similarly go overlooked.
And yet it’s hard to describe the women’s work as anything other than essential. It seems women are the connective tissue of fishing communities: bringing together other workers with hard-to-access resources.
If a fisherman needs a new trailer truck for his business and can’t afford it, he might come to them for help, said Nina Groppo, a colleague of Sanfilippo’s. When the pandemic hit, Sanfilippo said the wives helped families apply for unemployment and SBA loans and helped fishermen track down tariff relief funds that were owed to them, while their healthcare navigators helped fishermen parse the MassHealth system.
Despite all this, fishermen’s wives groups are often left out of discussions at a policy level, especially at the state and federal level.
“If we’re designing support for fishermen to help them through Covid, do we need to think in broader terms about who’s affected [in these economies] beyond just the fishermen themselves?” said Sarah Harper, a professor at the University of Victoria who studies the social dimensions of fishing communities.
Policies like tariff relief payments, industry-specific Covid relief and compensatory programs for regions affected by oil spills may assist fishermen who find themselves struggling – but if women back home are organizing among themselves to help prop up the industry, who is looking out for them?
“The implications of that oversight are quite significant. We have to consider all the people involved,” said Harper.
Asked what can be done to garner more recognition for fishermen’s wives, Hatton said she thinks these women are already on the right track. The fishermen’s wives groups, she said, “are taking up space and asserting that they deserve recognition for their work. It sounds like they’re doing part of that work of taking off the gendered lens that obscures our vision about what work is, and who does it.”
As Nina Groppo said, “Now fishermen’s wives are almost an icon.”