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

In today's fast-paced world we sometimes forget that railroads of the nineteenth century were the first forms of transportation to annihilate time and space. Railroads, however, played a far greater role than transforming these physical realities. In fact, Amy G. Richter's Home on the Rails argues that railroads became the sites and symbols of a reorganized cultural space in America. Richter, an assistant professor of history at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, began her study as a doctoral dissertation from New York University. As a monograph in the University of North Carolina Press series Gender and American Culture, Richter's study of railroad travel in the nineteenth century highlights the shifting identities of gender, class, race, and nation, the reordering of public and private spheres, and the rise of a consumer ethos. These transformations reveal larger social tensions and cultural changes occurring along the journey from Victorian to modern America. Richter's study makes a valuable contribution to social, cultural, and business history, and as such it will appeal to scholars and students of all three fields.

Using chronological and thematic organization, Richter devotes six chapters to the history of railroad narratives, employees, and travelers. Throughout the monograph, however, Richter's central focus is the increasing presence of female passengers aboard the chaotic rails of the nineteenth century. These women challenged separate spheres ideology as railroads and male passengers struggled to adapt. By the late nineteenth century, "public domesticity" presented a solution to the growing diversity aboard trains. The domestication of railroads created a new consumer space designed to limit unpleasant public interactions while offering passengers the private comforts of home. In the end, public domesticity and consumerism combined to revolutionize rail travel and alter Victorian etiquette. The female traveler was herself transformed from the "Victorian Lady" of the nineteenth century to the "New American Girl" of the early twentieth century.

As Richter makes clear, these transformations involved contradictory and incomplete transitions. Although women could enter the public realm of the railroad, their experience could not liberate them. In short, men and women failed to enter this commercial space on equal terms. Similarly, as respectable white passengers helped to domesticate the railroad for themselves, the new space created became racially segregated and class stratified to insulate these travelers from social diversity. Even African American passengers able to purchase better goods and services often were denied their rights as customers. Home on the Rails thus chronicles the bumpy journey of American society "from a culture of separate spheres to the public-private hybrid of American consumer culture" (p. 139).

Although a minor criticism can be made of the monograph's structure, since it lacks a conclusion to summarize Richter's complex argument, the research and analysis of the work are not at fault. Richter uses a myriad of sources while borrowing insights from social, cultural, and business history. The analysis of fictional and nonfictional narratives allows Richter to uncover the symbolism of railroads, illustrate the cultural tensions in American society, and discuss the expectations and experiences of passengers. These written and visual narratives include both published and private accounts of nineteenth-century rail travel. Advice manuals, etiquette guides, and company rule books not only trace the widening gaps between Victorian conventions and American realities, but they also highlight the transformation aboard trains as rail employees supplanted gentlemanly courtesy with customer service. The use of legal cases, however, portrays the contested nature of these new consumer spaces. Court records reveal the agency of white gentlemen and middle-class African American women who fought in similar but separate battles to enter ladies' cars in the absence of alternative genteel accommodations. These various sources help Richter present railroads as a microcosm of an American society in transition.

Richter may not regard herself as a business...