Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Gender and American Culture) - Softcover

Richter, Amy G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080785591X ISBN 13: 9780807855911

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Amy G. Richter is assistant professor of history at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The dissertation on which this book is based won the 2001 Lerner-Scott Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

From the Back Cover

Richter describes the railroad in nineteenth-century America as a site and symbol of the shifts in the balance of gender, race, and class in American culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080785591X
• ISBN 13: 9780807855911
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296