Set Adrift: Fishing Families

Henry G. MacLeod teaches sociology at both Trent University and the
University of Waterloo.

Marian Binkley, an anthropology professor at Dalhousie University, has
written a fascinating account of the impact of the fisheries crisis of
the 1990s on Canadian families in Maritime communities. What started as
an analysis of women’s role in the fishing industry expanded into a
study of the adaptations of fishers’ wives in rural Nova Scotia to the
extraordinary pressures put on fishing-dependent households by the
decline in fish stocks.

Media coverage usually treats the fisheries crisis as a major problem
for the fishing industry: reduced fish stocks, lost revenue, increased
unemployment. Binkley presents the human and social effects: its impacts
on families and communities and, in particular, women’s lives.

Supplementing in-depth interviews with other sources of statistics,
Binkley first shows how women’s paid and unpaid work varies according
to whether their husbands are coastal or deep-sea fishers. (Wives of
coastal fishers are involved in a family business and provide unpaid
labor; wives of deep-sea fishers are able to take paid work during their
husbands’ lengthy absences, but have had to find ways to be off work
when they are home.) Second, she demonstrates how their labor has
sustained the fishing industry and their families (the wives bear the
domestic responsibility for the household and children). And third, she
describes how these families have responded to the fisheries crisis,
which has placed an increased burden on the women as the families have
had to cope with the loss of their livelihood.

Binkley’s research on fishers’ wives adds significantly to the
social science literature that clearly documents men’s work in the
fishing industry. Her work also makes an important contribution to
gender studies as well as to our understanding of the human side of the
fisheries crisis. Binkley is critical of the government’s failure to
recognize the contribution women made to the fishing industry when it
was thriving and the costs they’re now bearing with its decline.