Most women involved in commercial fishing attend to the shoreside duties of the family business, although they will rig a line when they have to.

But many women are at the forefront of the movement against what fishermen view as government over-regulation and inflexibility.


In 1977, 18-year-old Terri Farscone showed up at the Coast Guard station in Boston to apply for a 100-ton boat captain's license.

The officers on duty laughed and told her to go home. She was not amused.

So after being turned away in Boston, she tried again to apply for a license, this time at the Portland, Maine, Coast Guard station. There, she recounts, they gave her an application that said "Mr." on the line for her name. She crossed that out.

Today, of course, no such shenanigans would be likely, although women at that level of the industry remain rare.

In the past, they were nonexistent. Of the 5,368 names inscribed on Gloucester's cenotaph memorial to fishermen lost at sea, not one is female.

But that is not to say there aren't fierce female fishermen out there — the best known being Linda Greenlaw of "Perfect Storm" fame, who stopped captaining a Gloucester sword boat in 1997; she now lobsters and swordfishes periodically in Maine.

Read the complete story from the Gloucester Daily Times.