September 13, 2026 Post by : Editorial Maritime Culture

Ask most people to picture a sea shanty singer and they will describe a bearded sailor on a deck. That image is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Women were largely excluded from the big square-riggers where the classic work shanties flourished, yet they were never absent from maritime song culture. They worked in ports, on ferries and coastal craft, on whaling ships in some roles, and in the boarding houses and sailmakers' lofts that kept the sailing trade running. Their relationship to shanties was different from that of the deepwater crews, but it was real, and it left marks on the songs themselves.

One place women appear constantly is inside the lyrics. Shanty verses are full of women — sweethearts left behind, landladies, dockside characters, and often women described in terms that range from tender to extremely bawdy. That is not accidental. The shantyman sang for a crew of men who had been at sea for months, and the songs gave them a way to talk about home, desire, and the world ashore. The women in the verses were sometimes idealized and sometimes mocked, but they were always present, which tells us something about what the sailors were thinking about while they hauled.

Women's Work and Maritime Song

Women also sang at work in maritime contexts, though the songs are less well documented. In port cities, women worked in fish processing, net mending, and sailmaking, and some of that labor had its own rhythmic songs and chants. In the Shetland and Hebridean islands, women sang while waulking wool — a group rhythmic task not unlike hauling — and those songs share structural DNA with work songs around the world. Whaling ships sometimes carried women in support roles, and coastal ferries and small craft often had mixed crews whose songs went unrecorded by the folklorists who focused on deepwater sail.

The bigger issue is whose songs got written down. Early collectors like Cecil Sharp and Stan Hugill were mostly recording what they could find from surviving deepwater sailors, who were overwhelmingly men. That does not mean women's maritime songs did not exist; it means they were less likely to be collected, published, and preserved. Historians have since recovered some of that material, but the gap is real, and it shapes the way we tell shanty history today.

Reclaiming the Tradition

In recent decades, women have moved to the center of shanty performance. Folk festivals, maritime museums, and online communities are full of women singing these songs, sometimes in mixed groups and sometimes in women's choirs. Some purists grumble that a shanty should sound like a crew of sailors, but that complaint misses the point. The tradition was always about voices joining together for a shared purpose, and that purpose — solidarity, rhythm, memory — is not gendered. A women's shanty choir singing a capstan song is not pretending to be a nineteenth-century crew. It is carrying the song forward into a new context.

That is how living traditions survive. They change hands. The shanties were made by working people, and working people today — of every gender — have every right to sing them. Remembering the women who lived and worked around the sailing trade, and the women who sang their own work songs, makes the picture fuller and the music richer. The sea was never only a man's world, even if the history books sometimes made it look that way.

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