ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the gendered face of stereotype, stigma and marginality. In effect, women’s prominent, public roles in the fishing industry helped to brand them and their families as odd, indeed, as less respectable than most other Scots. Fisher folklore is replete with taboos concerning women’s contact with boats or with fishermen on their way to the shore. The Gourdon women could be found baiting the lines in the old way into the 1980s and there “the men freely admitted that they owed their prosperity to their womenfolk, who each day baited 1200 hooks with mussels”. Women setting off to market fish often preferred to travel in groups, for these expeditions could be dangerous as well as exhausting. Ferryden’s parish records showed that many women delivered their first and even their second children in their mothers’ houses, even if they had married away from the village. The fisherwomen had a confidence and liberty which few other women could enjoy.
