Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity

Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity

Richter, Amy G.

Paperback

Series: Gender and American Culture

Trains19th Century United States HistoryWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 080785591X
ISBN13: 9780807855911
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: Mar 14 2005
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.87
Height: 0.73 Width: 5.92 Depth: 9.32
Language: English
Recognizing the railroad's importance as both symbol and experience in Victorian America, Amy G. Richter follows women travelers onto trains and considers the consequences of their presence there.

For a time, Richter argues, nineteenth-century Americans imagined the public realm as a chaotic and dangerous place full of potential, where various groups came together, collided, and influenced one another, for better or worse. The example of the American railroad reveals how, by the beginning of the twentieth century, this image was replaced by one of a domesticated public realm -- a public space in which both women and men increasingly strove to make themselves at home.

Through efforts that ranged from the homey touches of railroad car décor to advertising images celebrating female travelers and legal cases sanctioning gender-segregated spaces, travelers and railroad companies transformed the railroad from a place of risk and almost unlimited social mixing into one in which white men and women alleviated the stress of unpleasant social contact. Making themselves at home aboard the trains, white men and women domesticated the railroad for themselves and paved the way for a racially segregated and class-stratified public space that freed women from the home yet still preserved the railroad as a masculine domain.

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