Nantucket: While the Men Were Gone, the Women Ran Everything

In the 1840s, a third of all adult men on the island of Nantucket were at sea at any given moment — gone for three years, sometimes four, hunting sperm whales in the Pacific Ocean. Eight decades before American women got the right to vote, the women of Nantucket ran the island: The dry goods stores, the real estate, the family finances, the children. Nantucket women had property rights, business dealings, and legal independence that women in most of America wouldn't see for another century — not because anyone planned it that way, but because there was nobody else to do it.

The men, meanwhile, were burning whale fat to boil down more whale fat on a ship that smelled like hell and paid, if you were new and unlucky, approximately $25 for four years of your life. The ocean they were hunting had once been so full of sperm whales that ships in the 1820s found pods of a hundred. Now, they had to sail halfway around the world and would go days between sightings and only then would they be able to risk life and limb on a “Nantucket Sleigh Ride.”

 This is the story of one voyage — and the island it left behind.