‘This is jist my life noo’: Marriage,children and choice in a Scottish fishing community

Abstract

Previous research indicates that women often characterize themselves in terms of relationship status and parental role, although the precise meanings of such characterizations are subject to ongoing interactional negotiation. Here, we examine this phenomenon by studying the talk of a group of married women living in a remote fishing community in the far north of Scotland. Eleven women, all married to fishermen, were interviewed. Analysis of the interview talk shows that the women produced potentially competing versions of themselves: they described their lives in relation to the constraints they faced as fishermen’s wives, but they also described the freedoms and opportunities which arose from being married to a fisherman. These descriptions produce forms of self understandable as accomplishments of gender in the local context of talk about fishing as a male occupation and its consequences for women’s lives, and are discussed in relation to the notion of ‘hybrid identities’.