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1 1 Actually, it wasn’t so bad breaking into the operating department on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Jimmy Carter was president, the civil rights movement had gathered a decade of steam, and some legal barriers to women’s employment had fallen due to lawsuits. Ethnic minorities had preceded us into the crafts of trainmen and engineers, forcing the all-white unions to redefine their ideas of brotherhood. Now they would have to get used to including sisters. Ironically, it wasn’t until I had left the railroad in 2000 that a union member called me “brother,” but all my union correspondence was always addressed that way. Some women railroaders felt excluded by tokens such as this, but I always felt that until sufficient numbers normalized our presence, the most we could hope for was to be included in the generic. I remember a passenger coming up to me on the San Francisco commutes one day and pointing to my hat, which read “Brakeman.” “That should say brakeperson,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell him that?” I said, pointing to my fellow conductor . Until enough women were doing the job, you did not want to be identified as a brakeperson on the Southern Pacific Railroad. I guess what I am talking about is prejudice, which I never understood until I started working for the railroad. Prejudices are cherished notions that people do not surrender, even when they are contradicted by the facts. Some of the women who hired out with me would argue politics and feminism with their fellow workers, but I didn’t waste my breath. If you were a good worker, they would just think you were the exception. It wouldn’t change their ideas. We women were the last hired under the old labor contracts that included a full crew size. Technology, including hand-held radios, end-of-train devices, and centralized traffic control, soon replaced three of the five members of a train crew. The replacement of the engineerbyaremote-controlledunitwasaftermytime.Themassive attrition in jobs meant that no new trainmen, let alone new women trainmen, were going to be hired for a long time, almost twenty years. This cold fact gradually wore away at the camaraderie we felt during the first years in the late 1970s when we were breaking into the trade. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we would meet and share stories in the spirit of consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s. In my class of seventeen in Watsonville Junction in July 1979, there were three women. In the year before, there were four women. In August 1979 in San Francisco, there were two women. When I was working in 1999 as a switchman in San Jose, I was the only woman operating employee in the whole Bay Area. Railroad work has always been somewhat seasonal, but you could normally expect to work steadily in your home area after the first few years. This normalcy never occurred for us. The first few years we followed the work, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group of women, from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, Houston, Tucson, Ogden, Dunsmuir, and West Colton. We were boomers because to us the railroad was an unheard-of opportunity to earn B R E A K I N G - I N B L U E S 2 RailroadNoir.indb 11 12/17/09 2:01 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 1 2 goodmoney.Oftenourmalecounterpartslefttherailroadbeforewe did,simplybecausetheycouldmakeasgoodmoneylocally,whereas we couldn’t. Women’s willingness to move with the work or, later, to be force-assigned to a different location at the whim of the railroad, presented us with the biggest challenge we faced—breaking into a new womanless location constantly and having to deal with the prejudice that went along with that. Before I go much further, it is only fair to deal directly with this question: Can a woman do the job of brakeman on a freight train? When we hired out, one of the tests all brakemen had to perform was to pick up and carry an 85-pound knuckle for two car lengths. We all did this. In twenty years on the job, I never had occasion to carry a knuckle two car lengths. It would take a real knuckle-head to carry a knuckle that far. What you might occasionally have to do wastochangeoutaknucklethattheengineerhadrupturedthrough bad trainhandling.Inthiscase,youwouldwalkbacktotherupture, disconnect the rear of the train from the cars remaining behind...

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