I'd join the Navy. The Detroit News. A new exhibition, ''W0men and the Sea,'' at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va., features artifacts and stories of women and their lives on and around the sea. I wish I were a man. I'd join the Navy.
Women are there, but they're behind the men.
We're trying to push them to the front. As early mariners set sail, they sought supernatural protection against natural forces. Venus, the daughter of Neptune, god of the sea, was believed to hold sway over the oceans as well as the heart. Even though it was thought unlucky to have a woman aboard a ship, seafarers named their ships after women and used women as models for wooden figureheads that were mounted on the bow of a ship to ward off harm. The exhibition includes a figurehead from the schooner Irma Bentley, built in 1908.