Salons in the Queen's House: Rethinking maritime masculinities, 'female sailors' and their clothes

In this talk, Caird Fellow Ema Sala will look at sailors’ clothing and masculinity against the grain by turning their attention to 'female sailors'.

This was the term used in contemporary sources for people assigned female at birth who sailed as men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Taking J. M. W. Turner’s The Battle of Trafalgar as their starting point, which prominently depicts a group of sailors in the foreground, their talk focuses on sailors’ bodies, and in particular on the clothes they wore in the nineteenth century.

Ema Sala (they/them) is a Caird Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich, where they research female sailors.

They are the coordinator of Queer History Club, a community-led research group that has been active at the Museum since 2023, and have worked on events including Pirates Late and the Being Human festival in November 2025.

Their research interests are trans and working-class history, masculinities, fashion, and the embodied experience of being a sailor.

In spring 2025, they led a reading group on the Peglar papers, a document of the Franklin expedition (1845-1849?) held at the Caird Library. Their blog about female sailors can be found here and their blog about the Peglar papers here.