In the 1990s, historian Candace Clifford and her mother, author Mary Louise Clifford, identified nearly 200 women lighthouse keepers and female employees of the U.S. Though a few-like Ida Lewis-found fame during their lifetimes, the contributions of most women lighthouse keepers were kept in the dark for centuries until modern scholars were able to illuminate their stories. Hannah Thomas became the United States’ first woman lighthouse keeper in 1776 after taking over the duties of her husband, John, during his service in the Revolutionary War. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īmerican women have tended lighthouses since colonial times. “Women have been at the center of lighthouses since they existed,” says Shauna MacDonald, an associate professor in communications at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada, who studies women lighthouse keepers. As newspapers argued among themselves as to whether Lewis’s rowing a boat or tending a lighthouse on a rocky station was “unladylike,” women watched around the clock for shipwrecks, and climbed cumulative miles of steps to maintain burning lamps during treacherous storms in an era that restricted women’s roles and devalued their labor. Though Lewis gained international celebrity, a Congressional medal, and a reputation as “America’s bravest woman” for her daring rescues, she was just one of hundreds of women who tended lighthouses along United States coasts between the 18th and 20th centuries. It was all in a day’s work for “Ida”, who saved the lives of up to 25 people during her 54-year tenure as a lighthouse keeper at Newport’s Lime Rock Lighthouse. Expertly rowing her wooden skiff, she sighted the men through the New England spring squalls and hauled them into the safety of her boat. The vessel’s owner had already drowned, and the two men, who were headed back to nearby Fort Adams after a leave, were likely next.īut help was on the way in the form of 27-year-old Idawalley Zoradia Lewis. It was March 1869, and rough weather had turned a pleasure expedition into a perilous disaster. Two soldiers clung to their overturned boat, roiled by the frigid waters of Rhode Island’s Newport harbor.

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