Pronouns – Using ‘She’ to Refer to a Ship

Here is an excerpt from The Ants, the monumental, 732-page reference on every major topic in the scientific study of ants, by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson, two of the world's leading authorities on ants:

The Epiritus forager hunts a great deal in small crevices within the soil. Because of the tightness of the passages, she usually encounters the prey in front. The ant immediately crouches and freezes, pulling the antennae completely back into the scrobes that line the sides of her head. The mandibles remain closed. Even though the prey (a collembolan or small centipede) may be very close by, the ant never moves toward it. Instead, she remains perfectly still for periods of 20 minutes or longer, waiting for the prey to step on her head. Then, with a sudden upward snap of her mandibles, she impales the victim on the long apical teeth. [p. 565]

In formal settings, it is perfectly normal and expected to use the pronouns he, she, her, and him to refer to non-human animals when their gender is known. No anthropomorphism is implied.

See also the Chicago Manual of Style.

Both are nearly the same to me. The nuances are about perspective:

The sentence that uses "she" is talking about the "the little girl" from the memory, almost as if she was a different person than the woman in the present. You can use that phrasing to distance the two people. This is especially common when the speaker's view of the person has changed:

Before we started hanging out, I only knew you as the guy who came late to class everyday because he kept oversleeping.

The sentence that uses "you" links the person in the memory with the actual person. There is no distancing.