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Riding Jane Crow

African American Women on the American Railroad

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad. As Jim Crow laws became more prevalent and forced Black Americans to "ride Jim Crow" on the rails, the train compartment became a contested space of leisure and work. Riding Jane Crow examines four instances of Black female railroad travel: the travel narratives of Black female intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell; Black middle-class women who sued to ride in first class "ladies' cars"; Black women railroad food vendors; and Black maids on Pullman trains. Thaggert argues that the railroad represented a technological advancement that was entwined with African American attempts to secure social progress. Black women's experiences on or near the railroad illustrate how American technological progress has often meant their ejection or displacement; thus, it is the Black woman who most fully measures the success of American freedom and privilege, or "progress," through her travel experiences.| Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Off the Tracks: Race, Gender, and the American Railroad 1. Ladies' Space: An Archive of Black Women's Railroad Narratives 2. A Kiss in the Dark: Sexualizing Black Female Mobility 3. Platform Politics: The Waiter Carriers of Virginia 4. Handmaidens for Travelers: Archiving the Pullman Company Maid Terminus: Pauli Murray, Pete, and Jane Crow Notes Bibliography Index Back cover |
  • Honorable Mention, Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women's and/or Gender History, Organization of American Historians, 2023
  • Honorable Mention, Letitia Woods Brown Book Award, Association of Black Women Historians, 2023

    "Using literary analysis and comprehensive archival research, Thaggert resituates Pauli Murray's legal theorization of 'Jane Crow' into the context of Black female railroad travel, considering how Black women's experiences as passengers and workers trouble depictions of the train as a technological symbol of American progress." —Hypatia


    "Over the long twentieth century, black women navigated the gendered, sexualized, racialized hierarchies of American railroads, producing something new in American cultural history, a counter-story of Black female railroad history. With meticulous and creative archival research, Thaggert tells the story of Black female fugitive slaves, Black Pullman maids, Black female food vendors, and elite Black women travelers, who challenged the violence and humiliations of race and gendered train spaces and even, in some instances, secured their constitutional right to freedom and mobility."—Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s
    "In this well-researched and accessible volume, Miriam Thaggert explores the little-known histories of railroads and Black women, as passengers, food vendors and maids." —Ms. Magazine
    |Miriam Thaggert is an associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo and the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance.
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