They are unmistakable, ubiquitous fixtures of northeastern seaboard architecture, integral to the Nantucket skyline. The widow’s walks are small platforms, odd architectural appendages which protrude from the roof, bounded by a railing, allowing for clear views of the surrounding buildings, streets, and sometimes the horizon. The glum name comes from the iconic whaling wife of the nineteenth century who spent countless hours of her life perched upon it, gazing toward said horizon, awaiting the flag of her husband’s ship.

I have made up my mind now to be a sailor’s wife,
To have a purse full of money and a very easy life,
For a clever sailor husband is so seldom at his home,
That his wife can spend the dollars with a will that’s all her own,
Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea,
For a life of independence is the pleasant life for me…
—“The Nantucket Girl's Song,” c. 1855

She’d been waiting twelve or eighteen months, if she lived in the late eighteenth century, or up to four years if her time in New Bedford or Nantucket occurred in the mid-1850s, as whales were fished out of waters close to home and her husband, brothers, and sons were forced to travel to distant whaling grounds in search of whales to slaughter and drain of their oil so that homes and businesses throughout the newly expanding states and territories might be brightly lit.

She is easy to conjure, this Victorian-era whaling wife, her brood of fair, freckled children safely tucked into their beds like little goslings, lulled to sleep by her mellifluous voice. Pictured with her flowing gown, her rosy cheeks, her delicate vigor, she must also be hearty, as she comes from generations of seafaring New England stock, but not so robust as to compromise her feminine charm. She must be practical, stretching staples and stringing out currency for as long as she needs to, but stoic and creative in the face of deprivation. She must make do in her husband’s absence, but never lose sight of her place in the household: second in command. At her husband’s service.

Yet, when we look closely at many of these potential widows, we are hard pressed to find her up on the walk, gazing out at the horizon—she doesn’t have the time. By daybreak she’s in the kitchen, lighting the lamps, stirring together graham flour and milk, churning butter, wringing out wash. By midmorning she’s given the youngest children their lessons, sent the older ones off to school, and has visited at the dry good shops, milliners, bakery or, like Abby Grinnell, the family farm. In an 1845 letter (which can be found, among others in Lisa Norling’s excellent history Captain Ahab Had a Wife), she reports to her husband, then in command of the Westport ship Barclay:

Our corn is very large and the barley is very good. We have thrashed that in the corner lot and in the lot by the house and we got sixty bushels…I have bought me a cow to fat and I gave eleven dollars for her. Your oxen have done very well this summer and they are fat enough for beef.

By afternoon she’s gone to purchase something for the barn or the table or the store, and set by some medicines or knitted extra stockings to send to sea. At sunset, she’s seen about some acreage her husband—or herself—is interested in selling or buying, as Caroline Gifford did in 1867. Writing to her husband, Charles, she explained:

The Sherman land…was put up at auction about 3 months ago…I thought you wanted it & I wanted it & Brother Sherman seemed to think it would [be] a great advantage to this place…I got him to bid it off [.] he give 331 dossars for it…& I think it was very cheap.

By sundown she might have purchased insurance for her husband’s share of his ship’s cargo or written to her husband about the market price for rum. (Going up? Ship some home!) In hard times she might end the day with a note to a ship’s agent, hoping for an advance against his lay, as John Codd’s wife did in 1847, while he was in the Pacific on the whaling ship Columbia:

I must say I do not feel that you have treated me well; My Husband did not think you would let his family suffer for the necessries of life, when he shipp’d in your employ. I am out of Food and Fuel, and unless you can do something for me must write by every Ship for him to return and take care of his family.

In Letters from an American Farmer, French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur observed of the whaling wives of Nantucket in the mid-eighteenth century:

As the sea excursions are often very long, the wives are necessarily obliged to transact business, settle accounts, and, in short, to rule and provide for their families. These circumstances, being often repeated, give women the abilities as well as a taste for that kind of superintendency, to which, by their prudence and good nature, they seem to be in general very equal.

This employment, he goes on to say, “entitles them to a rank superior to that of other wives.”

Superior, indeed. Yet the whaling wife is at the same time everything a good Victorian wife isn’t: shrewd, strong, sometimes imperious, her husband’s partner in everything from asset management to home improvement. A whaling wife in 1750 might have agreed easily with Crèvecoeur’s assessment, but a century later, she would have been more likely to demur, in the sappiest, most vaporous terms imaginable, even as she went on thrashing the barley and buying the livestock. Who was this ideal Victorian wife supposed to be? What was this ideal? She certainly wasn’t a sun-weathered, calloused, shrewd businesswoman with intellectual and physical desires on par with her seagoing husband. The Victorian woman was governed by her emotions, physically weak, genteel, and, especially, primarily, family-oriented.

This “angel in the house” is best described by Coventry Patmore’s eponymous 1854 poem:

Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes

Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress’d,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers...

One would think that a “sea-wife” who, as Lisa Norling has pointed out, regularly “settled accounts in cash or goods with creditors or debtors, insured cargo, paid taxes…” in addition to advising their far-flung husbands on market conditions for importing goods, as well as keeping schools, taking in piecework or boarders, and on and on, would never succumb to such a saccharine portrayal as desirable.

But she did. Like women across time, she was not in any way immune to societal expectations, and was eager to live up to the ideal she saw reflected in the literature, music, and popular culture of her day. Even hardy, busy New England whaling wives, in their own words, tried to position themselves as these ideal wives and mothers, and in the most florid terms imaginable—at least, when they were writing to their husbands:

“Oh! where I can find happiness, except it is in conversation with you,” wrote twenty-one-year-old Ruth Grinnell to her fiancé, first mate on the New Bedford whale ship Harbinger, in 1850:

A few trifling lines…affords but a small share of pleasure in comparison to what it would be, could I behold you face to face, and enjoy your society forever, in this and the future world…What should I do if you should die, I should long to die, all I have to hold me here is you.

Their husbands and fathers were also happy to remind them of what they were supposed to strive for, as Captain Hiram Coffin did when he reminisced about his late wife for the benefit of his eleven-year-old daughter, Betsey:

[R]evere your Mothers Memory for she was every thing that was Lovely in Woman. She was an honour to her Sex. Such a Mind…was the Seat of all the Superiour qualitys—of Modesty, Chacity, Sincerity, Virtue, piety, friendship, and Love.

In a similar vein, Captain Seth Blackmer reminded his wife, his ‘dear treasure,’ that she was a: "[T]rusting loveing and industrious little Woman the moddle of mothers and who strives to make Home happy."

In other words, she was perfect.

The written record notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine that these sea-wives truly believed themselves to be angels at home, intellectual weaklings, fragile, needy sprites. Even as they fulfilled their duties and talked the Victorian talk, they were literally running the show onshore. And while they were at it, new ideas about their role in society were beginning to flower in the salons and societies of cities less than a hundred miles away.

”It is the prayer of your Harriet’s heart that you may return to me once more,” mooned Harriet Gardner, Captain Jared’s wife, in 1843. Yet at the same time—perhaps even on the same day—Margaret Fuller was holding court in her Boston sitting room, addressing a gaggle of women that included Louisa May Alcott and Mary Moody Emerson and the Peabody sisters, espousing the idea that the natural role of a woman was anything BUT that of a passive flower. “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” Fuller wrote in her memoirs. And in her seminal work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she threw down a rousing call to arms for full civil rights for women:

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to women as freely as to men. If you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply— any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea captains, if you will.

The women of Nantucket, New Bedford, and other seafaring communities were certainly privy to Fuller’s work, as well as the writings and lectures of her contemporaries, progressive thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley, and they were in the audience on the lecture circuit up and down the New England coast. These women also joined in what historians call the “reading revolution,” availing themselves of the avalanche of broadsheets, magazines, newspapers and other periodicals that were flying off the presses of New England like so many flocks of starlings. All this reading was a direct (if not immediate) path to independent thought and the desire for a degree of freedom beyond the choice of bone or ivory linen for one’s trousseau. Even as men espoused and publicly acclaimed the weakness, subservience, and fragility of the good Victorian woman, the women themselves, at least in maritime communities, were beginning to explore an entirely new idea of themselves and who they might become.

And that Victorian standard, recently described in The Atlantic as one “which unflinching equated a woman’s moral character with her virgin status?” Turns out it wasn’t quite so stiffly upheld in a maritime culture that saw courting couples separated by sea journeys of two-four years. As Captain Jared Gardner wrote to his beloved Harriet, in 1843, with all the time he had onboard to think back, he felt “sorry for the liberties I took before we were married.” If not exactly encouraged, premarital sex was tolerated (so long as it was a precursor to actual marriage), and a fairly regular occurrence.

So the angels at home were maybe not such angels after all. They were hard workers, keen businesswomen, keepers of home and hearth, as well as joiners, lecture-attendees, reading-club-members, abolition workers, and, as Crevecoeur put it, “incessant visitors.” They kept up appearances, to be sure, and even strove to attain the ideals of their time, but as Susan Winslow, who accompanied her captain husband to sea, wrote to her sister in 1860, “Perry said you like being at sea first rate, and so do I. It is a great deal more pleasant than being at home.”

Which leads us back to the widow’s walk. As it turns out, the notion of the pining wife, left at home to swoon with sorrow: she might have absolutely nothing to do with those little platforms after all. A reasonable evaluation suggests these were built for fighting chimney fires and not, after all, for catching a first glimpse of a long-awaited seafarer.