I wrote:
> That's silly. Everyone knows that it would be impractical for women to > work on most small fishing boats. > Not quite true. Women can work on fishing boats with mostly women crews. You see them in Japan. Such as: http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DFC7KR/female-divers-shinjuto-island-where-mr-mikimoto-started-growing-white-DFC7KR.jpg These are photogenic women. They are wearing wet suits. They used to dive naked, which was even more photogenic. That was a little before my time. Wetsuits were introduced in 1964. http://gakuran.com/ama-the-pearl-diving-mermaids-of-japan/ On the Inland Sea, women often work on boats that are so small they come back to port every day. Husbands and wives often work together. They did in the old days, anyway. In the 1960s families used to live and work on small boats in the Inland Sea. The kids would run around and playing on boats, climbing the rigging and carrying groceries up single-board gangplanks, in ways that would NEVER, EVER be allowed today. It would be unthinkable. It still gives me the heebie-jeebies watching those kids. They commute to school on motorboats. They drive cars at high speed on dirt roads because there are no policemen on small isolated islands in the Inland Sea. Here is a 6-foot-tall Japanese fishing woman working a windlass in 1949. She was running as many risks as any male fisherman. I expect she was as tough as nails. I knew a lot women in that part of the world in 1974. They were feminine but tough. They were remarkable people. (Plus, most Japanese people could barely understand them, since their dialect was 100 years out of date. I was one of the few native speakers of English who can understand them.) https://library.osu.edu/projects/bennett-in-japan/images/full/13/12.jpg Lots of photos of life as it was: https://library.osu.edu/projects/bennett-in-japan/2_13_photos.html - Jed
