Myth and Materiality in a Woman's World Shetland 1800-2000

The place of women in Shetland society is unique. In this isolated island group off the north of Scotland, women dominated the family, economy and the cultural imagination for 200 years. Here, women were numerically preponderant and economically vital. They maintained families and communities because men were absent. In their minds they constructed an identity of themselves as ‘liberated’ long before organised feminism was invented. This book examines how in the nineteenth century Shetland became a female place. Despite an appearance of outward masculinity, where contemporary identity still draws on the exploits of the Norseman, this land of fishermen and seafarers concealed a feminine way of life and culture, a place where traditional gender roles were reversed. It examines the opportunities and life experiences of women in a place where more of them worked and fewer got married than anywhere else in the British Isles. And it is about the relationship between myth-making and historical materiality and the ways in which the people of this most northern archipelago of the British Isles have imagined their past. Reconstructing this ‘woman’s world’ from fragments of cultural experience captured in written and oral sources, the author recreates and explores Shetland using its inhabitants’ material experience and personal testimony. This book will appeal to scholars in the fields of social and cultural history, social anthropology, gender and women’s studies.

Lynn Abrams is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow.