Changes in the fishery meant a changing role for women. Women started working outside the home and bringing home a paycheck. Since the late 60s women have taken a leadership role in community development - in the Southern Labrador Development Association, the Women's Institute and municipal government.
Women started their own businesses and worked to keep their community vital.

Margaret Buckle tells us how the WI Craft Shop was started: "Now our reason for building the craft shop was traditional crafts on the coast were beginning to become a thing of the past...So we formed up a Women's Institute here on the coast and Women's Institute was a organization to help women to learn new things, better develop their knowledge and skills, become better business people and whatever. So they became really interested in trying to develop more crafts. For the first two years all the crafts that were produced were sold out of the community center in Pinware. Sylvia Buckle use to operate the Craft Shop for us or the Craft portion. And a lot of tourist were coming to the Pinware Park at that time, so people use to drop by the community center and buy crafts and of course, it was very encouraging to know that people were interested in the kind of crafts that we were producing."