Ladies of the lamps The lives of female lightkeepers
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AUTHOR SHONA RIDDELL has a long-held fascination with lighthouses and family connections to two lightkeepers. Her engaging book offers a very useful history of both the social and technical evolution of lighthouses and lightkeeping, ranging from ancient times right up to 2020. It focuses on (mainly white) women’s roles as lightkeepers and their relations, but also covers rare instances of Aboriginal, Native American, African–American and Hispanic keepers of both sexes.
Attending a lighthouse’s lamp was described in 1870 as a task ‘so easy that it can be discharged by a woman’, but female lightkeepers were largely expected to do the same duties as their male counterparts on top of their traditional tasks of child rearing and caring for a household. Many women inherited the job from fathers, brothers or husbands who died or became ill, but others were appointed on their own merits. Some served for decades.
The book’s eight chapters deal with the origins and evolution of lighthouses; the role of a keeper; lighthouse heroines Grace Darling and Ida Lewis; the lives of female keepers; the impact of isolation; ghosts, legends and mysteries; lighthouse women in the 20th century; and today’s keepers and caretakers. Riddell relates the stories of a wide variety of women who lived with, loved and hated their lights. Emily Fish, the ‘socialite keeper’, filled her quarters with antiques and art, hosted soirées for artists and writers and kept thoroughbred horses and French poodles. Kate Walker spent 33 years at Robbins Head Lighthouse, New York, first as assistant and later as head keeper, at the same time raising two children and, weather permitting, rowing them to school. (By 1966, four men were performing the job that tiny Kate – 1.4 metres tall and weighing just 45 kilograms – had undertaken for more than three decades.)
A few of these ‘women’ were mere girls, like Ida Lewis, who by 15 was helping her mother with lighthouse duties, and by 16 had rescued the first of many (mostly drunk and ungrateful) men from peril. Ida became the most famous – and highest paid – lightkeeper of her time. She spent 54 of her 69 years at Lime Rock, off the coast of Rhode Island, and is the only American lightkeeper to have a lighthouse named after her.
Signals 134 Autumn 2021
The book examines both the romantic place that lightkeeping holds in art, literature and the popular imagination and the very real lack of romance that such a life entails. Many of the dangers are obvious: gales, storms, high seas, hard work, loneliness and isolation. Other, more obscure perils include death by swallowing molten lead, being hit by an iceberg or a Zeppelin, or suffering terrifying and destructive mass bird strikes.
