Gender, Emotion, Work and Travel: Women Transport Workers and Passengers, Past and Present (review)

Transport historiography, like train spotting, is not much a place of petticoats or critiques of patriarchy. So this was a most welcome foray into the history of women and the operations of gender on the sea, on trains, planes, buses, and in borderlands such as dockyards and harbours. The two-day event that took women’s competence absolutely for granted was held, ironically, in the baroque Old Royal Naval College, Wren’s Versailles-on-Thames and hegemonic mainstay of the dominance of the seas by privileged British males. How would antique admirals have coped with this absolute ignoring of sea-skills, wardroom etiquette and the defence of the realm within their portals?

The conference, complete with sunshine and outdoor incidental music, was organized by Sarah Palmer, Maggie Walsh (who co-organized the seminal Transporting Gender conference at the National Railway Museum in 2000 and edited the special gender issue of Journal of Transport History, 23: 1, March 2002), and Minghua Zhao. Around forty people gathered, a number of them, such as Sari Mäenpää and Lisa Norling, from overseas.

The eight sessions, some of them parallel, were: Gender at Work, Resourcing Travel, On the Move, Mobilizing Safety, Dangerous Journeys, Working Connections, Viewing Journeys and Travelling Scenes. While most papers tended to focus on the nineteen and twentieth centuries, the plenary speaker, John Urry, spot-lit the present day and the future. He spoke about ‘network capital’ – the social relations with nonproximate others that are so beneficially sustained by moving about. Similarly Gayle Letherby and Gillian Reynolds, who are already preparing a book on gender, emotions and travel (Ashgate, 2008), looked not only at modern women train travellers, but at their own gendered self-presentation, as modern travelling writers.

The ‘work’ element of the conference title brought up issues such as why women had been actively excluded from most transport work by unions, employers and male peers; relegated to be drudges cleaning carriages or lowwaged eye-candy in airline cabins. Opposition to women workers in transport included assertions that women spread disease, cause social instability in powder-keg situations, lose their heads in emergencies, need concessions made to their well-being and reduce men’s wages. Counter-arguments (of a sort) for letting women into certain transport roles claimed that females are naturally clean and good at catering work, mature, attentive, steady, content with low pay, bring order and a pleasant atmosphere and are better than men at dealing with female passengers. This relegation was counter-pointed by some speakers’ discussions of ‘progress’: are women train drivers a sign of victory? The impact of globalization on segregated tasks was noted.

Emotion was the focus of several papers, notably Sowande Mustakeen’s controversial analysis of black women’s shipboard traumas in the Atlantic slavetrade. And the twin operations of race and class emerged again in analyses of images of ‘air hostesses’ and what lay behind Lufthansa’s changing employment of Thai, Indian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese women. It’s all in the deference.

Women’s right to travel has of course been a controversial social issue. Moral and physical safety has often been mobilized as an excuse to corral those who dare to seek mobility. Papers with this focus covered migrating German Protestants and the Travellers’ Aid Society set up to accommodate them; the spin of the publicity surrounding female victims of railway accidents in UK and US; and the gendered construction of safety on pre-war UK railways.

Female transport workers, like female passengers, are not only women at (debatable) risk and matter out of place. Both categories of traveller (those whose labour brings ‘spatial remuneration’, and those who buy a ticket) are united by gender but often divided by class. Such connections were implicitly made in one paper that explored women’s shipboard authority and another exploring the nexus of stewardesses’ shifting relationships with passengers. There is also the pleasure of escape. Drew...