I came across this book entitled The Trolley and the Lady (1908) and thought, wow, great, this is going to be a great exploration of turn-of-the-century “transportation liberation” from the perspective of a liberated woman! But I should have known, as it was written by a man (William J. Lampton), that this would not be the story. Indeed, it’s a tale of a man chasing a woman on a trolley from New York City to southern Maine. He seems to catch up with her in my home town, York Harbor. In a way I guess it is about liberation, as the woman in question, Clara, is exploring New England via trolley, but it’s definitely not written from her perspective. Still looking for that perspective, I encountered a lot of projection and instruction related to the topic of women and trolleys. After I read the Lampton book, I found a charming and practical little piece, still from a male perspective, in The Puritan magazine, a women’s monthly published in 1899-1900: illustrating the right and wrong way that a woman (equipped with the cumbersome skirts of the era) should flag, board, and disembark from a trolley.
Despite the paternalistic instruction and aside from the conductor, the woman is alone, and that’s the key point. Like bicycles and later cars, trolleys were a way for women to get out and get away, on their own. But trolleys are even better than those other vehicles: no physical exertion was required and very little money, and there were routes everywhere in the early twentieth century: 940 miles in New England alone according to one trolley company’s advertising.
As street railways expanded beyond urban cores in the later nineteenth century, images of trolleys emphasized exploration rather than commuting, and featuring women was a good way to reinforce that message. Charles Herbert Woodbury’s two wonderful lithographs for Boston’s suburban trolley network (1897 & 1895) really illustrate this messaging well.
Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth; the second poster is inspired by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1891 poem The Broomstick Train or the Return of the Witches.
This post is just a teaser; there’s something about trolleys and gender that is interesting and needs a bit more exploration. The sexes/masses are pushed together in close contact: there are new opportunities, new connections, new horizons, and the need for new rules. The Puritan story is a bit condescending for sure, but there are more misogynist commentaries on trolley-riding women from the same era, generally regarding the “immodesty” of their dress as they climbed on or off. There is the occasional critique of male passengers (see below, upper right) but many more postcards targeting women: this is the age of “vinegar valentines” after all. A spinster chasing down the last trolley on the “Matrimonial Line” is not nice! And then there’s that old chestnut about street cars and women. Too much protesting, I think.
