INTRODUCTION

A world apart

From darkness to light, light to darkness. Lighthouses are a curious contradiction: they symbolize hope and trust, but also solitude and hardship. These remote beacons have saved thousands of lives over the centuries and provided comfort to those on ships and on land, steadily blinking their lights across the ocean. Yet many of them now sit empty, cloaked in legend and mystery, with sorrowful tales of solitary keepers perched on sea-ravaged coastlines.

If you live in a coastal town, you probably live near a lighthouse. From the hills surrounding my seaside home in Wellington, New Zealand, I can look across the harbour entrance to the old Pencarrow Lighthouse, a small white tower perched on the headland. Its light hasn’t shone since 1935 but it is a maintained historical site, a daymark for ships and an integral part of the city’s landscape. First lit on 1 January 1859, it was New Zealand’s first permanent lighthouse and the home of Mary Jane Bennett, New Zealand’s first — and only — female lighthouse keeper. A widow with six children (another had died in infancy), she took over her late husband’s job and efficiently managed the light for ten years.

Mary was the inspiration for this book, and her story can be found inChapter 4. I wanted to know why she was the country’s only female keeper and if there had been many others around the world. My curiosity has taken me on a (metaphorical, low-carbon) journey through the centuries and around the globe, to some of the world’s most fascinating towers.

WOMEN’S WORK

Stories of female lighthouse keepers are not new. In the United States, for example, there have been female keepers in sole charge of lighthouses since at least the late 1700s. From 1820 to 1859 at least 5 percent of principal keepers employed by the federal government were women (more than 200 women were also appointed assistant keepers during the nineteenth century), most of whom received equal pay to their male counterparts, and several also had male assistants — all of which seems astonishing when we recall that this was almost 100 years before American women were allowed to vote.2

These women performed difficult work in extremely challenging conditions — night and day, all year round, through storms, blizzards and even hurricanes. They saved sailors’ lives, indirectly by keeping the light burning to enable the safe passage of ships, and also by rowing out into thrashing surf to rescue crew and passengers in peril. Yet it is only in the past few decades that work has been done to acknowledge most of these women