History/ES 247 Reading Guide

Coastal and Island Economies

  • film, Maine Independents: Our Fishing Heritage 60 minutes (PBS 1999).
  • Nancy Payne Alexander, “‘Taking up the Slack’: Penobscot Bay Women and the Netting Industry,” Maine History 45.3 (2010), 259-280. (e-reserve)

Further reading on Harpswell and Orr’s Island:

  • W.H. Doughty, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, With Landscape Descriptions (Portland, 1899).
  • Annie Haven Thwing, The Story of Orr’s Island Maine (Boston, 1925).
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862).

Further reading on Seafaring Communities on the Maine Coast

  • Philip W. Conkling, “Introduction: Apart and Between,” “Downwind Histories and Ecologies,” in Islands in Time: A Natural and Human History of the Islands of Maine (1981), xi-xvii, 10-40.
  • John F. Battick, “The Searsport ‘Thirty-six’: Seafaring Wives of a Maine Community in 1880,” American Neptune 44 (1984), 149-154.
  • Haskell Springer, “The Captain’s Wife at Sea,” in Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920 (1996), 92-117,253-256.
  • Priscilla Paton, “Winslow Homer’s Seascapes: Transcendental Subjects, Critical Reactions [Prout’s Neck, 1884-1910],” Maine History 34.2 (1994): 78-95.
  • Sarah Orne Jewett, “At the Schoolhouse Window,” “Captain Littlepage,” “The Waiting Place,” “The Outer Island,” “Alongshore [Elijah Tilley]” from The Country of the Pointed Firs (1886).

Questions:

  • How and why did island and coastal women (and some men) turn to home manufacture—“putting out work”—after 1860 as a means of earning an income to support their families?
  • What does Alexander mean by a “hidden economy”?
  • Did women on Islesboro turn to fish net working because Vinalhaven women already involved, through the efforts of John Carver, in specialized netting?
  • What evidence does Alexander use to build her description and argument about the development of the netting industry on Islesboro?  What do you make of her causal explanations?
  • Are women’s contributions to the family and community economy a surprise?