| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women & the Whalefishery, 1720–1870. By Lisa Norling. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvi, 372 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2561-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4870-0.)

From its provocative title to its rich bibliography, Lisa Norling's Captain Ahab Had a Wife does not disappoint. This is an ambitious book, one that tackles important questions and analyzes them over an inconvenient span of time that few historians are brave enough to attempt at all, let alone in a first book. Her sources are wide?ranging, reflecting the breadth of her subject as well as a lot of impressive spadework in the archives. 1

Norling confesses in her introduction that the book began as an attempt to refute the ideological power of the cult of "true womanhood." As an undergraduate, she wondered "how could anyone have taken seriously the saccharine, sanctimonious pap pervading the period's popular literature" and decided to "look in New England maritime communities for strong, independent women who had withstood the rising tide of Victorian domesticity." Despite her best efforts, however, she did not find them. This book, thoroughly grounded in the religious and economic history of Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts, above all tells a story about the power of culture over economics and lived experience. . . .

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