Women on the Tide

In Wellfleet, Mass., arguably the oyster capital of North America, shellfishing and harvesting have been a way of life for centuries. The earliest occupants, the Wampanoags, settled here in part for the rich abundance of oysters and shellfish. As commercial shellfishing became more and more popular in the mid-1800s, the town set up a grant system to protect the harbor and prevent over-harvesting.

With the weather harsh, the winds frigid, and the work strenuous, it is understandable that when most people picture the traditional oyster farmer they visualize a man. In fact, for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, most grants were licensed to men. But by the 1970s more and more women wanted in. Today over 30 percent of Wellfleet’s shellfishermen and wild harvesters are women.

This, however, wasn’t the case 70 years ago when a curious and outgoing eight-year-old named Peggy Jennings, on her first visit to Wellfleet, dared to ask Tony Oliver, the constable at that time, what the men were doing in the water off Mayo Beach. Oliver walked Peggy along the shore and explained that the men were oyster farming.

Back then virtually every oyster grower was a man. But that didn’t deter Jennings.

“I decided then and there that’s what I wanted to do,” recalls Jennings, who can still be found working the grant she shares with her daughter Nora. Now Nora and her mother, Peggy, are just two of the many women on the tide.

Edward Boches

Edward Boches is a Boston and Cape Cod-based documentary photographer.

Interested in how photography can connect us, help us understand each other, and inspire empathy, Boches has photographed such diverse communities as inner-city boxers, former gang members, Black Lives Matter activists, transgender men and women, pro-life and pro-choice advocates, women shellfishers, and homeless writers. He makes it a point to meet and photograph at least one stranger every day.

His work has been shown in museums and galleries that include the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA); the Bronx Documentary Center (NY); the Cambridge Association for the Arts (MA); the Plymouth Center for the Arts (MA); the PhotoPlace Gallery (Middlebury, VT); the Providence Center for the Photographic Arts (MA); and in Boston at both the Bromfield Gallery (online) and Panopticon Gallery, among others.

Boches’s work has also been distributed internationally by the Associated Press and has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Sun Magazine, ZEKE Magazine, and the Provincetown Independent, where he is a regular contributor.

In 2021 and 2022, he received multiple grants for public art installations for his community-based project Postcard from Allston. The project advocates for small businesses, raises money for local arts initiatives, and calls attention to how gentrification disrupts communities and affects the artists who reside there.