Julia Jones’s new book Stars To Steer By celebrates women’s involvement with sailing and the sea in the 20th century. To celebrate International Women’s Day, Julia, a guest at this year’s festival, tells us what inspired her to write about this subject
Through much of the 20th century, recognition for women in sailing was rare. When I took over the book pages at Yachting Monthly magazine, I inherited a popular feature called ‘A Book at Bunk Time’, for which an extract is chosen from any sailing book the editor thinks readers would enjoy. Of the 46 titles previously chosen, only two were by women. I was determined to change that proportion. I leafed through issue after issue of the 20th century magazine finding almost no articles by women, no letters from women, no reviews of books by women. Did that mean that 20th century women didn’t go sailing? Weren’t interested in boats? Or couldn’t write?
I didn’t need to wait for Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women or for Mary Ann Sieghart’s The Authority Gap to know this absence of women was both unfair and untrue.
I was born midway through the 20th century in 1954 and was taken sailing from carry cot to teenage years. I’ve a sneaking suspicion I might even have been conceived on board… my mother and father had sailed their small yacht to take part in the July 1953 Coronation Review and had remained afloat for much of August. I was born the following April. There were plenty of other girls and women on the River Deben when I was growing up, but somehow it was men who dominated the sport, owned the yachts, ran the clubs, wrote the books and articles.
The public face of 20th century British society was male. Men ran the government, the professions, owned most of the national assets. Sailing seemed to take that imbalance to extremes, with women often actively excluded. In 1876, Anna Brassey and her husband Thomas had started their circumnavigation from the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes where he was a member. Women were not admitted as members until 2013, almost 200 years.
Anna wrote a book about their 11-month voyage, which was published in 1878 and became an international bestseller. Had it been published a decade earlier, before the introduction of the Married Women’s Property Act (1870), her earnings would have belonged to her husband. The book’s success was unlikely to have made any material difference to Anna Brassey’s life – the Brasseys were already rich – yet successful authorship brought her deep personal satisfaction, gave her a sense of purpose and ensured that she was acknowledged and remembered, in the sailing world at least.
As society slowly changed, with the achievement of women’s suffrage, with the opening up of education, access to the professions, the concept of equal pay for equal work, changes in women’s control over their own bodies, so sailing changed.
The century ended with public delight at the achievement of Ellen MacArthur, who finished second in the extraordinarily difficult and prestigious Vendée Globe, at the age of 24. Tiny, determined, successful, four years later she broke the speed record for a single-handed, non-stop circumnavigation. And there were so many others.
In Stars To Steer By, I wanted to write about those women in the 20th century who wanted to take the helm into their own hands, to be in charge of their own adventures. The women who are the ‘stars’ of my book are truly inspirational for their individual tenacity in the face of social opposition, as well as for their courage and skill at sea.
Julia Jones will be discussing Stars To Steer By on June 29th at 4.30pm. International Women’s Day 2025 is on March 8th.
