For this month’s After Dark at the Movies, I’m writing about The Damned, a folk horror film about 19th century Icelandic fishers who find themselves in desperate straits and faced with the consequences of a terrible choice. I found it interesting that the small crew included two women – an older woman who cooks for the crew and a younger woman who manages the site and the crew, and whose gender never seems to be an issue when it comes to exerting authority and leadership.
This movie sent me down an internet rabbit hole where I found that women were an integral part of Iceland’s fishing industry for centuries.
Iceland women show up in ancient sagas as seafarers. Gudrid the Far Traveller, who was probably born around 985, voyaged over much of Europe and visited Greenland, Vinland, Norway, and Rome. Aud the Deep-Minded lived even earlier, and shows up in several sagas as a woman who captained her own boat on a journey from Scotland to Iceland.
Many Icelandic women achieved legendary status. Thurídur Einarsdóttir was famous for never losing a single crew member and for having a side business as a private detective.
Anna Björnsdóttir kept fishing even while pregnant.
Rósamunda Sigmundsdóttir is famous for wearing red skirts to attract seals.
Halldóra Clubfoot filled her boat with exclusively female rowers and beat men in countless rowing challenges.
Icelandic fishing in the 18th and 19th centuries was not particularly segregated by gender.
In a review of Sea Women of Iceland, Jane Nadel-Klein states:
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it seems, fishing provided some relief and women played key roles as crew and even as boat captains.
Roberta Kwok wrote an essay about this same book in which she quotes the author:
Willson’s team combed through historical archives and publications to gather examples ranging from a female captain who led crews made up entirely of women, to expectant mothers who rowed late into pregnancy.
The sea “wasn’t a male space,” says Willson, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and a former seawoman. “It was not a feminist act in any way for them to go to sea.” It was just part of everyday life.
As the articles linked below describe in detail, women eventually became less involved on boats but deeply integral to fish processing which bolstered Iceland’s economy from 1903 to the 1969. Síldarstúlkur, also known as herring girls, poured into coastal towns to process fish directly from the boats. These young women changed Iceland’s economic world and found independence financially and socially.
While the herring girls enjoyed financial independence and a lively social life in dock towns that exploded into large cities, their work was difficult. The herring girls worked long hours, called at any time of day and night whenever a boat came in. The conditions were miserable and many started very young. One woman describes starting at work on the docks alongside her mother on her seventh birthday and being “an independent herring girl” by age eleven. The herring girls were passionate and savvy labor organizers who fought in strikes and demonstrations for pay equity and better working conditions.
Elizabeth Heath relates how this independence helped advance women’s suffrage and other rights for women in Iceland:
Herring girls’ organizing efforts took place around the same time that women won suffrage in Iceland. The country’s first women’s rights organization formed in 1894 and collected signatures on voting rights petitions. By 1907, 11,000 women and men—more than 12 percent of the population—had signed on. In 1915, women over 40 were granted the right to vote, and in 1920, the country introduced suffrage for all citizens ages 18 and up.
Later she relates:
In 1968, the Arctic Ocean herring fishery collapsed as a direct result of overfishing. The once-plentiful Atlantic herring was on the verge of extinction, and Iceland’s economy took a sharp tumble. Siglufjörður and dozens of towns like it emptied out. Fish processing plants were abandoned, boats sat idle in harbors and docks no longer hosted lively gatherings. But even as many herring girls returned to domestic duties, their impact on Icelandic politics and society continued to resonate.
Today only a small percentage of Icelandic women work on boats, but even the pervasive sexism in the industry has never driven them away altogether.
I fell into this topic because of my interest in The Damned, set in the 1800s. Sea Fever is another excellent independent horror movie. Set in 2017, it features an Irish fishing crew captained by a woman. The tiny crew includes another woman as well as a female biologist.
Real life fishing captain Linda Greenlaw became famous following the 2000 film adaptation of the nonfiction book A Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger. She published her own memoir, The Hungry Ocean in 1999 and has published several subsequent nonfiction books as well as novels.
Back in Iceland, the 2025 documentary Strengur (also released as Tightlines) tells of young women learning to be fishing guides on Iceland’s rivers. Perhaps the depiction of women at sea and in the other roles within the fishing industry will bring women new recognition and opportunities within a changing social and environmental world.
Iceland’s Forgotten Fisherwomen
Seawomen of Iceland: Survival on the Edge by Margaret Willson (a review by Jane Nadel-Klein)
How Iceland’s Herring Girls Helped Bring Equality to the Island Nation
Women of the Seas: A Brief History