Captain Ahab had a wife: New England women & the whalefishery, 1720-1870

1. Nantucket and the eighteenth-century whalefishery.

2. Family, faith, and community on colonial Nantucket.

3. The impact of religious reform, revolution, and romanticism on Nantucket.

4. New Bedford and the nineteenth-century whalefishery.

5. Love, marriage, and family in the nineteenth-century whaling communities.

6. The failure of victorian domesticity on shore and at sea.

Conclusion: the Nantucket girls song.