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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.4 | The History Cooperative
102.4  
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December, 2006
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Reviews

Home on the Rails
Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity

By Amy G. Richter
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. xiii, 272. Clothbound, $49.95, paperbound, $19.95.)

"The Train is Coming," a stylish fashion plate in Godey's Lady's Book of May 1850, depicted two women in crinoline skirts admiring a train on a far-off viaduct safe from the belching beast's soot and cinders. Two decades later Godey's celebrated the completion of the transcontinental railroad—"a great work begun, carried on and completed by men only." In a bow to its feminine readership, the journal lauded the "humane and peaceful employment" of womankind in the trade and friendly intercourse of nation building (p. 2). 1
      In this engaging study, Amy G. Richter rides the rails with the women of Victorian America, exploring a rich and shifting complex of private values and public culture. Richter's exhaustive readings of female travelers' diaries and letters provide lively anecdotes and narrative for an incisive account of how the new woman traveler molded an "at home" ideal on the railroads, taking the parlor from the front room to the dusty coach and transforming it. The engineer still kept his hand on the throttle but behind him he hauled "An Adamless Eden on Wheels," a palatial railcar fitted out for ladies and the bane of male riders forbidden to enter this rolling paradise (p. 110). . . .
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