I arrived in shetland for the first time on one of the worst days of January 1999, accompanied by gale force winds and horizontal rain. As we entered the warm and comforting surroundings of the airport terminal I was confronted with a departure lounge crowded with men. There were very few women present at all. The weather had grounded the oil workers who were awaiting their flights to the rigs. Since the 1970s oil boom women have been in the minority in these islands, although many of the ‘surplus’ men are transient workers. Shetland today is often characterised as a...

One chilly day in the spring of 2001 I sat down with Mary Ellen Odie in the Old Haa at Burravoe on the island of Yell to talk about women in the past. In response to my questions about the economic and cultural position of women in Shetland history Mary Ellen told me a series of extraordinary stories about individual women who have come to exemplify the condition of Shetland womanhood. There was the woman who suffered distress following the disappearance of three of her sons at the whaling in Greenland and the suicide of a fourth son overcome with...

Women dominated the shetland landscape in the nineteenth century. They outnumbered men, particularly amongst the age groups active outdoors, and this made them much remarked upon by commentators. Women were highly visible and highly productive, which made for a sharp contrast to most other places in Britain. This contrast extended from a material occupation of the landscape and its economy to a discursive dominance. Elsewhere in the British Isles women of the middle and increasingly the working classes were discursively confined to those spaces deemed appropriate by the ideology of domesticity: the home and parlour, the servants’ quarters, the factory.¹...

The deceptively simple reply given by the Lerwick knitter Andrina Simpson upon being asked whether she did anything else in addition to knitting to make a living speaks volumes. For Shetland women marriage meant induction into a fishing-crofting household wherein their role was as producers as much as reproducers. When the United Kingdom Truck Commission visited Shetland in 1872 for the purpose of investigating the persistence of truck in the islands, it uncovered a picture of women’s work that had largely disappeared elsewhere in the British Isles. The commission focused on the fishing and hand-knitting industries, for it was in...

The extensive nature of everyday intercourse between women in Shetland spawned complex sets of relationships. Women’s prominence and independence in the world of work, their residential groupings and their mutual reliance on one another in the context of a high male absence and death rate resulted in a high degree of female solidarity governed by codes of behaviour relevant to women’s culture. Shetland men were mobile, coming and going between land and sea, but women’s day-to-day lives were conducted within a tighter framework of responsibilities and expectations in the township and in Lerwick which, in turn, were influenced by demographic...

In the nineteenth century, official conceptions of moral order were largely equated with female sexuality. A moral society was one in which women’s bodies were controlled through an ideological system that defined women primarily as wives and mothers, thereby placing restrictions on female sexual expression and fertility. By this measure Shetland was the most moral place in Scotland. The islands had the lowest illegitimacy rate in the country in the nineteenth century. In 1861, compared with the Scottish average of 9.2 illegitimate births for every 100 births, the figure in Shetland was 4.3, and it remained low throughout the century....

Visitors to shetland in the nineteenth century regarded the women they encountered as subordinate and put-upon. But at the same time they admired their physical and mental strength. Outsiders understood that this society could not be compared with other rural communities in other parts of the British Isles, and they frequently used the iconic crofting and knitting female as a symbolic means of conveying this difference. Implicit in their descriptions of women was an ambiguity about the power women possessed. The wife of a fisherman who carried his sea-chest on her back for miles while he walked beside her or...

This study has been a work of historical anthropology. It has been impossible to separate the past from the present because the past is constantly reified and reconstituted in the present. The combination of approaches – historical and anthropological – has proved essential in Shetland, where the past is not somewhere or something forgotten but a vibrant, living place which is constantly evoked in order to make sense of the present.¹ And women have a prominent place in both time-scapes.

The past is personal in the stories narrated by Shetland women. The Shetland landscape is populated by individuals whose experiences...