She-ship
Pulter’s feminized stately ship fits into a long tradition in English of feminizing watercraft that persists to this day. This excerpt from Henry Manwayring’s contemporaneous dictionary of nautical terms exemplify the habitual nature of this gendering in its use of feminine pronouns, without explanation or preamble, to refer to ships in general, as opposed to a specific ship named after a woman.
- These words, termes, and proper names, which I set down in this book, are belonging either to a ship, to shew her parts, qualities, or some things necessary to the managing and sailing of her…
- Aloof.
- Is a term used in conding the ship, when she goes upon a tack, and is commonly spoken from the mouth of the condoy, unto the steers-man, when he suffers the ship to fall-off from the wind, and doth not keep her so near, by a wind as she may well lye.
The habit of feminizing ships was a two-way street: not only were ships referred to as “she,” but women were sometimes likened to ships. The chorus’s description of Dalila in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) emphasizes Dalila’s apparel and comportment by comparing her to a ship:
- But who is this, what thing of Sea or Land?
- Femal of sex it seems,
- That so bedeckt, ornate, and gay,
- Comes this way sailing
- Like a stately Ship
- Of Tarsus, bound for th’Isles
- Of Javan or Gadier
- With all her bravery on and tackle trim,
- Sails fill’d, and streamers waving,
- Courted by all the winds that hold them play,
- An amber sent of odorous perfume
- Her harbinger, a damsel train behind;
- Some rich Philistian Matron she may seem,
- And now at nearer view, no other certain
- Than Dalila thy wife.
The edition from which the above excerpt is taken notes a similar instance, in Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News, of Lady Pecunia being likened to “‘a galley, Gilt in the prow’, wearing adornment that costs ‘as much as furnishing a fleet.’” In addition to such insinuations of ostentatiousness, likening women to watercraft frequently carried sexual connotations. In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistresses Page and Ford playfully refer to themselves as ships as they share their reactions to Falstaff’s letters:
- MISTRESS PAGE
- For sure, unless he know some strain in me that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me in this fury.
- MISTRESS FORD
- Boarding, call you it? I’ll be sure to keep him above deck.
- MISTRESS PAGE
- So will I. If he come under my hatches, I’ll never to sea again.
Another example of the sexual meaning of “boarding” occurs in John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (1609-11, with performances recorded in 1633 [for Charles I] and 1660; a folio edition of plays by Fletcher and his collaborators came out at the onset of the Civil War). Here, men refer to a woman contemptuously as a “tumbrel,” a type of barge:
- JAQUES
- The tumbrel,
- When she had got her ballast –
- PEDRO
- That I saw too.
- JAQUES
- How fain she would have drawn on Sophocles
- To come aboard, and how she simpered it!
In this same play, sexual connotations are also pronounced in the nautical puns Petruchio applies to his new wife, although he also compares himself to a warship. As Lucy Munro explains, the term “pink” could refer to both a boat and a “whore”; a “foist” could be a boat or a “cheat”; and “cockle-boat” was a variant for “cock-boat,” slang for the genitals (18n in the cited edition).
- May I with reputation
- (Answer me this) with safety of mine honour –
- After the mighty manage of my first wife,
- …
- ... – suffer this Cicely,
- Ere she had warmed my sheets, ere grappled with me –
- This pink, this painted foist, this cockle-boat –
- To hang her fights out, and defy me, friends,
- A well-known man-of-war?
Although Pulter’s poem aligns with the widespread and longstanding habit of applying female pronouns to ships, it avoids the often-attendant disparagement of women. The persistence of this habit is evident in the controversy that arose in the 1990s when “curatorial and education departments” recommended that the Australian National Maritime Museum use neutral pronouns in explanatory text referring to ships.1 A tea-towel exhibited at this same museum and “sold in the gift shops of many maritime museums” also evinces the persistence of misogyny linked to this habit.2 The tea-towel features phrases, from a tract titled “Why is a ship called She?”, such as “it takes an experienced man to handle her correctly,” and “it takes a lot of paint to keep her looking good.”3 Centuries before this controversy, Margaret Cavendish’s views would seem to condone the museum’s move towards gender neutrality. Cavendish opines on the practice of gendering various objects and concepts, expressing a refusal to be held to such conventions:
NOBLE READERS,
I know there are many scholastical and pedantical persons that will condemn my writings, because I do not keep strictly to the masculine and feminine genders, as they call them as for example, a lock and a key, the one is the masculine gender, the other the feminine gender, so love is the masculine gender, hate the feminine gender, and the furies are shees, and the graces are shees, the virtues are shees, and the seven deadly sins are shees, which I am sorry for; but I know no reason but that I may as well make them hees for my use, as others did shees, or shees as others did hees. But some will say, if I did do so, there would be no forms or rules of speech to be understood by; I answer, that we may as well understand the meaning or sense of a speaker or writer by the names of love or hate, as by the names of he or she, and better: for the division of masculine and feminine Genders doth confound a scholar more, and takes up more time to learn them, than they have time to spend; besides, where one doth rightly understand the difference, a hundred, nay a thousand do not, and yet they are understood, and to be understood is the end of all speakers and writers; so that if my writings be understood, I desire no more; and as for the nicities of rules, forms, and terms, I renounce, and profess, that if I did understand and know them strictly, as I do not, I would not follow them: and if any dislike my writings for want of those rules, forms, and terms, let them not read them, for I had rather my writings should be unread than be read by such pedantical sholastical [sic] persons.