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Gender in the History of Transportation Services: A Historiographical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Margaret Walsh
Margaret Walsh
Affiliation:
Margaret Walsh is professor of American Economic and Social History at the University
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Extract

Transportation is one of the service industries in which women are now active participants in both mature and developing economies. Traditionally dominated by male entrepreneurs and workers, transportation in westernized nations has had to accommodate the demands of women with the passage of legislation imposing conditions of equality. The global search for cheap labor is another factor that has propelled women into the fields of international and local travel, tourism, and transportation. Although businesses in recent years have placed a premium on human mobility, rapid movement of goods, and instant communication, there has been little historical research that connects the past with these developments, nor has there been a concerted effort to under-stand the impact of gender on the shifts in direction.

Type
Literature Review
Information
Business History Review , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2007 , pp. 545 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2007

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References

1 For examples of these types of gendered history, see Alisa Freedman, “Commuting Gazes: Schoolgirls, Salarymen and Electric Trains in Tokyo,” 37-45; Beth Muellner, “The Deviance of Respectability: Nineteenth Century Transport for a Women's Perspective,” 37-45; and Ian Carter “The Lady in the Trunk: Railways, Gender and Crime Fiction,” 46-59, all in the Journal of Transport History 23, no. 1 (Mar. 2002)Google Scholar; Cohen, Patricia C., “Safety and Danger: Women on American Public Transport, 1750–1850,” in Gendered Domain: Rethinking Public and Private in Women's History, eds. Helly, Dorothy and Reverby, Susan M. (Ithaca, 1992), 109–22Google Scholar; and Harrington, Ralph, “Beyond the Bathing Belle: Images of Women in InterWar Railway Publicity,” Journal of Transport History 25 (Mar. 2004): 22–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12 For information on the International Association for the History of Transport, Technology and Mobility, T2M, see the Web site www.t2m.org, and for the position of this organization with regard to the ongoing debates about transportation history, see the editorial by Mom, Gijs in the Journal of Transport History 27 (Mar. 2006): ix–xi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The journal is affiliated with T2M. See also Divall, Colin, “Transport Museums: Another Kind of Historiography,” Journal of Transport History 24 (Sept. 2003): 259–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 Walsh, Margaret, “Iowa's Bus Queen: Helen M. Schultz and the Red Ball Transportation Company,” Annals of Iowa 53 (Fall 1994): 329–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Not Rosie the Riveter: Women's Diverse Roles in the Making of the American Long-Distance Bus Industry,” Journal of Trans-port History 17 (Mar. 1996): 43–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmucki, Barbara, “On the Trams: Women, Men and Public Transport in Germany,” Journal of Transport History 23 (Mar. 2002): 60–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matheson, Rosa M., “Women and the Great Western Railway with Specific Reference to Swindon Works” (Ph.D. diss., University of the West of England, 2002)Google Scholar; Stanley, Jo, “‘Wanted Adventurous Girls’: Stewardesses on Liners, 1919-1939” (Ph.D. diss., Lancaster University, 2004)Google Scholar, and “Go East Young Women (But Not Often): Inter-war British Indian Line Stewardesses,” in British Ships in China Seas: 1700 to Present Day, eds. Harding, Richard, Jarvis, Adrian, and Kennerley, Alston (Liverpool, 2004), 99–112Google Scholar; and Maenpaa, Sari, “Women below Deck: Gender and Employment on British Passenger Liners, 1860-1938,” Journal of Transport History 25 (Sept. 2004): 57–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Advertising has proved to be an accessible way of examining the impact of, and the use of, women in transportation services. See Behling, Laura L.. “Fisher Bodies: Automobile Advertisements and the Framing of Modern American Female Identity,” Centennial Review 41 (Fall 1997): 515–28Google Scholar; Harrington, “Beyond the Bathing Belle”; Margaret Walsh, “Gender and Advertising in the Service Sector of the American Bus Industry,” paper presented at the European Business History Conference, Frankfurt, Sept. 2005; Lyth, Peter, “‘Think of Her as Your Mother’: Airline Advertising and the Stewardess, 1930-80,” unpublished paper, 2006Google Scholar.

24 For a useful discussion on agency and the construction of gendered activities, see Lerman, Nina, Mohun, Arwen Palmer, and Oldenziel, Ruth, “The Shoulders We Stand On and the View from Here: Historiography and Directions for Research,” special issue, “Gender Analysis and the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 38 (Jan. 1997): 9–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Ayers, Pat, “The Making of Men: Masculinities in Interwar Liverpool,” in Working Out Gender: Perspectives from Labour History, ed. Walsh, Margaret (Aldershot, Hants., 1999), 66–83Google Scholar. For an insightful discussion of working-class masculinity, see Baron, Ava, “Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker, and the Historian's Gaze,” International Labor and Working Class History 69 (Spring 2006): 143–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Valerie Burton, “‘Whoring, Drinking Sailors’: Reflections on Masculinity from the Labour History of Nineteenth Century British Shipping,” in Walsh, ed., Working Out Gender, 84-101; see also Burton's article, “The Myth of Batchelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarch and Seafaring Labour,” in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Labour, eds. Howel, Colin and Twomey, Richard J. (Fredericton, N.B., 1991), 177–98Google Scholar.

27 Lisa A. Lindsay, “Money, Marriage, and Masculinity on the Colonial Nigerian Railway,” and Lindsay, Lisa A. and Miescher, Stephen F., “Introduction: Men and Masculinities in Modern African History,” both in Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, eds. Lindsay, Lisa A. and Miescher, Stephan F. (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003), 1–28, 138-55Google Scholar; Lindsay, Lisa A., “‘No Need… to Think of Home’? Masculinity and Domestic Life on the Nigerian Railway, c.1941-61,” Journal of African History 39, no. 3 (1998): 439–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003)Google Scholar.

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29 Ibid., 81-83; Paul M. Taillon, “‘To Make Men out of Crude Material’: Work Culture, Manhood and Unionism in the Railroad Running Trades, c.1870-1900,” in Boys and Their Toys? ed. Horowitz, 33-54; Strangleman, Tim, Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation and Culture Change in the U.K. Rail Industry (Houndmills, 2004)Google Scholar.

30 For information about African American workers on the railroads and on their fraternal organizations, see Santino, Jack, Miles of Smile, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters (Urbana, Ill. 1989)Google Scholar; Chateauvert, Melinda, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, Ill., 1998)Google Scholar; and Arnesen, Eric, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, Mass., 2001)Google Scholar.

31 See, for example, Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kimmel, Michael, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

32 The classic study of emotional labor is Arlie Hochschild's work on nonunion Lines, Delta Air, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley Calif., 1983)Google Scholar.

33 Rozen, Frieda S., “Turbulence in the Air: The Autonomy Movement in the Flight Attendant Union” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1988)Google Scholar; Kolm, Suzanne L., “Women's Labor Aloft: A Cultural History of Airline Flight Attendants in the United States, 1930-1978” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1995)Google Scholar, and “‘Who Says It's a Man's World?’ Women's Work and Travel in the First Decades of Flight,” in The Airplane in American Culture, ed. Pisano, Dominick (Ann Arbor, 2003), 147–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tyler, Melissa J., “Women's Work as the Labour of Sexual Difference: Female Employment in the Airline Industry” (Ph.D. diss., University of Derby, 1997)Google Scholar; Dooley, Cathleen M., “Battle in the Sky: A Cultural and Legal History of Sex Discrimination in the United States’ Airline Industry, 1930-1980” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 2001)Google Scholar; Barry, Kathleen M., “Femininity in Flight: Flight Attendants, Glamour, and Pink-Collar Activism in the Twentieth Century United States” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2002)Google Scholar; and Vantoch, Victoria, “Representing America in the Cold War: The Airline Stewardess, Glamour, and Technology, 1945-65” (Ph.D. in progress, University of Southern California)Google Scholar.

34 For other recent studies that place flight attendants in mainstream labor history, see Cobble, Dorothy Sue, “A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm: Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women's Service Jobs in the 1970s,” International Labor and Working Class History 56 (Fall 1999): 23–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar. Cobble does not use the concept “emotional labor,” though her work addresses the issues involved in treating female workers in stereotypical ways as sex objects, office wives, or “mammies.” See also Boris, Eileen, “Desirable Dress: Rosies, Sky Girls, and the Politics of Appearance,” International Labor and Working Class History 69 (Spring 2006): 123–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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38 Maenpaa, “Women below Deck”; see also Stanley, “‘Wanted Adventurous Girls.’”

39 Minghua Zhao, “Emotional Labour in a Globalised Market: Seafarers on Cruise Ships,” Working Paper Series 27, Seafarers International Research Centre, Cardiff University, May 2002, 1-28.

40 Armstrong, John, “Transport History, 1945-95: The Rise of a Topic to Maturity,” Journal of Transport History 19 (Sept. 1998): 103–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mora, Gijs, “What Kind of Transport History Did We Get? Half a Century of the Field,” Journal ofTransport History 24 (Sept. 2003): 121–38.Google Scholar

41 Kwolek-Folland, Angel, Incorporating Women: A History of Business in the United States (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.