Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
When Ali Farrell was doing press for her book, “Pretty Rugged: True Stories From Women of the Sea,” reporters would often ask her why she used the “wrong” word when referring to women in the lobster industry.
“One hundred percent of the women I talked to called themselves lobstermen, and some people asked me why I used what they said was an inappropriate word,” Farrell said. “I had to explain to them that female lobstermen aren’t lobsterwomen, or lobster fishers. They are lobstermen.”
Across the board, lobstermen is the preferred term for anyone who works on a lobster boat in Maine. It doesn’t matter what age, background, sexual orientation or gender you are: If you’re working on a boat, you’re a lobsterman. Same goes for sternman, if you’re prepping bait and sorting through the day’s catch.
A sternman is a sternman and a lobsterman is a lobsterman, no matter who is wearing the gear.
It can confound people unaccustomed to Maine culture, and specifically that of lobster fishing communities, that women would fully embrace a word that appears to be meant for men. In Maine, lobsterman is a gender-neutral term.
“I’ve been doing this for 38 years, and I’ve never referred to myself as anything but a lobsterman,” said Heather Strout-Thompson, who is captain of a lobster boat out of Harrington. “My dad was a lobsterman. My grandfather was a lobsterman. That’s what I am, too.”
“There are female lobstermen who show up to work in a full face of makeup. They aren’t trying to deny their gender or make themselves more masculine,” Farrell said. “It doesn’t matter that the word ‘man’ is at the end of it. It’s just who they are. It’s their heritage.”
As of 2021, approximately 15 percent of lobster licenses in Maine are held by women, a number that continues to rise. A decade ago, that number was less than 5 percent, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. And when people like now 102-year-old Virginia Oliver of Rockland started fishing nearly nine decades ago, it was closer to zero.
“There’s even an old wive’s tale from way back that it was bad luck for a woman to go on a boat,” said Zach Smith, who fished lobster out of Jonesport with his family for many seasons. “That’s kind of despite the fact that people name their boats after their wives and mothers. The boats are women, but some people didn’t want women on the boats.”
Smith also called himself a lobsterman despite the fact that he is gender non-conforming — when he wasn’t on the boat, he was the drag queen frontman for the punk band Beach Trash, and has performed in drag shows around Maine.
Women who worked as lobstermen had to go up against not just the elements and the backbreaking work, but also long-entrenched sexism in the industry and in society in general. They often had to work harder than the men to prove their capability and their worth.
Perhaps one of the reasons the word lobsterman has no gender is because women in the industry only want to be treated the same as men.
“I just want to make the same money and have the same opportunities as everybody else,” Strout-Thompson said. “I want respect on my own merits, not because I’m a woman or in spite of the fact that I’m a woman. Who cares what I am as long as I do a good job?”
There’s also the fact that Maine has always embraced a kind of live-and-let-live ethos. You do your thing, I’ll do mine, and we’ll all get along fine. While not everyone abides by that credo, it’s afforded Mainers the chance to generally be less judgmental.
“Lobstermen are pretty independent, and just want to be left alone to do their thing without interference. They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them,” Smith said. “That’s definitely true of the lobster industry. It’s probably true of a lot of Mainers as well.”
He thinks that the use of lobsterman as a gender-neutral term just shows that people are able to accept changes in language and different ways of expressing gender more readily than they might think.
“Maybe it means that people are more open to gender nonconformity than they think they are,” Smith said. “They’ve been using gender-neutral language this whole time and they don’t even realize it.”
That spirit of egalitarianism also is true for people who don’t necessarily work on a boat. This year, the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland announced that after more than 70 years it would no longer choose a young woman to be named the “Sea Goddess” to represent the lobster industry — instead, it would choose a festival delegate among anyone aged 16 to 22 who is “passionate about being an advocate for Maine’s lobster industry, regardless of gender.”
And besides, Strout-Thompson said, words are of little concern in her day-to-day life.
“Believe me, in this industry, they can call you way worse things than a lobsterman,” she said. “At the end of the day, I only care about doing a good job. I’m not going to get too worked up over a word.”
