“Look at the map.” With these words the Pennsylvania Railroad invited travelers to contemplate its routes: New York City to Toledo, Chicago to Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh to Cincinnati…. The choices seemed limitless; the permutations mesmerized. Dazzled by the intricacies of the Pennsylvania’s lines, the viewer might have missed the larger picture: the routes were printed on the torso of a woman–right across the bodice and balloon sleeves of her dress, her expression serious and her eyes dark. The message, perhaps unintended, is significant; during the nineteenth century, railroads and women appeared to have little in common. Indeed, within the cultural values of the day, the ideals of the railroad stood in opposition to those of “respectable” womanhood. The first represented Victorian hopes of commercial, technological, and national progress; the second embodied a realm of moral and emotional rejuvenation beyond the reach of such social change. Yet, as the Pennsylvania’s “railroad poster girl” suggests, despite their cultural distinctiveness, women and the railroad share a history. To see it, though, we must train our eyes to take in both at the same time. To that end, this study considers women on trains as the key to a different map, one charting the changing terrain of nineteenth-century public culture.
To see women and the railroad together demands a recasting of railroad history and historiography–a shift away from technological innovation and economic indicators. Railroads have long been understood as places of masculine power–of industrial labor, technological development, business innovation, and political debate. But if trains, as traditionally depicted, were “masculine” because of the power of their engines and the courage of their engineers, they were “feminine” because of the domesticity of their parlor cars and the refinement of their female passengers. In the summer of 1869, Godey’s Lady’s Book made this point in an editorial celebrating the . . .