Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History) by Miriam Thaggert

Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History) Reviews

• 
  Robin Loves Reading

  American Women, especially American Black Women had a very strong role in the history both as passengers and workers on the American railroad during the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. One of the things that really caught my attention is how some women had to dress as men in order to ride in at least some sort of style on various train cars. I felt like I was on the train with these women during those early. years.
• 
  Vicuña

  This book was a revelation in so many ways. I know little about the American railroad and it gave me a real feel for the way trains and rail travel worked in the latter part of the 19th and early 29th century. I’d never thought of journeys in the context of how space is occupied and the effect that has on those around. It’s an interesting and provocative angle and I learned from it. More to the point are the experience of black won en and the author draws extensively on new research material to provide the detail.
  
  It’s a challenging read; I was emotionally engaged with many aspects of the stories and the injustices meted. It’s also a scholarly read and I’ve tackled in sections over a few weeks with time to reflect on each part. It’s uncomfortable. Even within the opening pages I was appalled to learn of a group of respectable book club members, black women, forcibly evicted from a train as recently as 2015…for making too much noise and being abusive. The rail company later admitted this was incorrect.
  
  I love social history and these are the stories of real women who worked or travelled on the American railroad. Their voices deserve to be heard and it’s one of the best non fiction titles I’ve read this year. It’s left me wanting to know more and I’m grateful to Netgalley for a review copy of the book via the publisher.
• 
  Lynn Dixon

  Miriam Thaggert takes a scholarly approach in her new book Riding Jane Crow which deals with the mobility of black women on the American railways. She borrowed the coined phrase Jane Crow from Pauli Murray, a woman who often disguised herself as a boy while catching freights trains and enjoying her freedom. Thaggert shows how black women worked as waiter carriers that brought hot food to the trains during pit stops before there were dining cars and sold food and wares in the train depots over the decades
  
  As a Newberry Library fellow, she uncovered information about the little-known Pullman maids. Though they were often college-educated, these women of color worked to style the first-class traveling women’s hair, give mani-pedis and read to or cared for their young children. These Pullman maids were only one to a train and they often faced dangers, assaults and other perils which included unfair treatment from their conductor/supervisors. But they still made history while being determined to make the best of their situations. This is a highly researched book and well worth reading!
• 
  Kathy Piselli

  Probably my favorite part is the chapter on the waiter carriers of Gordonsville, Va. It reminded me of a train trip I took - in third class - from Cairo to Luxor, Egypt. This was not the more expensive express train; it was the one used by locals who needed stops in each and every village. At each station were crowds of vendors on the siding, and on the tracks, hawking beverages and cooked food, and serving people through the windows (Coke and Pepsi were "Kwakwila" and "Peeps"). People ate from a real plate, scooping up food as fast as they could and returning the plate to the nimble vendor as the train gained speed out of the station. Many of the vendors were women. This was in 1974. Perhaps today, as in Gordonsville, their place has been taken by a clean cafeteria in air conditioned splendor inside a station building. I wouldn't be surprised. But back to the book, while the more academic sections left me in the dust, Thaggert unearthed incredible personal stories from the archives she visited. The danger faced by Black women who used the trains either for work or for travel was frightening. The story where a wife passes as a white man with her husband posing as her slave, the woman who passes for a boy and rides the rails with hobos, and the invasiveness of the Pullman Company as an employer were great stories.
• 
  Mariama Thorlu-Bangura

  "Riding Jane Crow" by Miriam Thaggert is a unique book, in that it covers a topic that doesn't get much attention. Thaggert's goal is to present to the reader a window into the world of African American women, and their experiences on the rails during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jim Crow was the unspoken law of the land, especially in the South. As a result, African American women were treated differently on the train, on the platform, and in general. The book is very detailed, yet at times, extremely repetitive. It reads more like a master's degree dissertation than a general book on a unique topic. While I enjoyed learning about the topic, it took a great deal of patience to get through the book. You have to be a true African American history buff to read this book. For those in that category, I would recommend this book.
  
  Thank you to NetGalley and University of Illinois Press for this advanced copy, which I voluntarily read and reviewed. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
• 
  Annastasia

  Miriam Thaggert is a unique insight into the world of Jim Crow and the different standards applied to black women during travel. In “Riding Jane Crow”, the author ties in both personal experiences and fictive accounts by individuals who experienced the restrictions themselves. Thaggert also brings to attention the fact that the double standards held for black women continue to this day and the fight for equal treatment continues. While this is an interesting topic overall, this book read so much like a thesis that it took an effort to continue through the book and seemed rather repetitive in places, hence the three star rating.
  
  The copy I read was provided by NetGally and University of Illinois Press, and the review is my honest opinion.
• 
  William Fuller

  I'm not at all comfortable criticizing many published books. After all, researching and composing a book is far more difficult than is simply reviewing one. Still, when an author takes the step of commercializing his or her literary creation, that is, selling copies to the reading public, that author opens the door to public opinion. I suppose the old adage of “stay out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat” applies, which is probably one of the several reasons I've never attempted to write anything beyond a few specialty magazine articles. With this admission, my observations on Riding Jane Crow are not particularly complimentary.
  
  In my view, the text of the book reads very much like an academic paper—and not an adroitly written one either. Observations made by the author are repeated multiple times, often more or less verbatim. The writer also falls in love with a few specific terms that she reuses far too frequently; nearly every situation that she addresses is described as “fraught.” Now, I normally have no problem with that word, but its continual repetition throughout the text becomes tiresome and, along with the rest of the uninspired text, suggests that the writer's creativity is indeed limited.
  
  Speaking of limitations, what does the reader glean from the 133 pages of Riding Jane Crow? (The book does have 188 numbered pages, but 55 of these are peritext such as notes, index, and bibliography. On this point, I'll mention that another 22 pages are an “Introduction” in which the author tells us everything she is going to tell us again later in the book.) If Thaggert is correct, and she provides no statistics to validate this point, the book points out one thing that I have not come across in other sources, i.e., that 19th century American railroads provided a vehicle (literally, as it were) on which escaped slaves as well as Blacks freed by the Civil War left the South in hope of finding more accepting surroundings in other states. Beyond that observation, however, the writer merely belabors the obvious: Blacks were ill-treated on 19th and early 20th century railroads. Black riders, regardless of the service class of their tickets, were frequently relegated to inferior “Jim Crow” rail cars. Black female riders were subject to sexual harassment by white male passengers. Railroad stations as well as 1st class coaches were rigidly segregated. Female Blacks were doubly discriminated against, first because of their race and secondly because of their sex. The positive progress exemplified by railroad expansion and ballyhooed by white travelers was seldom seen in that light by Black passengers. None of these observations is particularly novel. In short, Riding Jane Crow adds remarkably little to the history of, as the subtitle reads, “African American women on the American railroad.” Thaggert expends quite a few words belaboring obvious, well known, and thoroughly documented conditions.
  
  Speaking of the author's vocabulary, the transformation of nouns into verbs is not at all unusual in the English language. Nonetheless, coming across constructions such as “metaphorize” (i.e., to make a metaphor) distracted me so much from the text that I cannot even remember what the metaphor was supposed to be! Such constructions are jarring enough, but, given the preponderance of the first person pronoun in the text, the author's ego is thoroughly unbelievable. On one page alone, we find the text sprinkled with the phrases “I analyze,” “I examined,” “I complicate,” and “my earlier discussions.” Yes, this review includes use of the 1st person pronoun, but that is something I would never do in an objective article that did not include my personal opinion.
  
  “Metaphorize,” by the way, can now be found as a defined word in contemporary on-line sources although it does not appear in any of several print dictionaries I consulted, including an unabridged lexicon and, accepted or not, I find it an awkward and ungainly word. However, another “verbed noun” elsewhere in the text does seem to be an unarguable malapropism: “Robinson's lawsuit . . . prefigured African Americans' reduced ability to rely on the court for redress from discrimination, later sedemented with Plessy v. Ferguson.” “Sedemented” is an intransitive verb meaning to have settled to the bottom of a liquid. A court case is purely incapable of “sedementing” anything. Thaggert also occasionally employs the term “paralepsis,” a perfectly good word but hardly one that a general reader is likely to understand, but then a good book does help expand its readers' vocabulary!
  
  As the character of Inigo Montoya says in the film dramatization of The Princess Bride, “let me sum up”: Riding Jane Crow strikes me as an academic paper written for fellow academics and perhaps to help support the author's retention or promotion by providing her an additional published work to cite in her curriculum vitae. There is nothing whatsoever amiss with that audience or that objective. However, the book does not appear to be intended for a general readership and does very little if anything to further the public's knowledge of the subject matter. What I found to be a colorless, uninspired rhetorical style of writing further weakens the book so far as its interest to a general audience is concerned. It rather pains me to say that the book is hardly worth the time expended in reading it.
• 
  Lynn

  African American Women on Trains
  
  Academic book about African American women experiences on trains. They were often vulnerable to sexual assault on trains by men. The ladies’ cars were often reserved for White Women. African American women were much more likely to be food sellers at train stops and later maids on trains than ordinary travelers.
• 
  Elizabeth Higginbotham

  Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad by Miriam Thaggert is a very interesting book about the many ways the railroad impacted the live of Black women. In the industrial age, the railroad was important in implementing segregation in its architecture and the treatment of passengers and workers. White supremacy is operationalized in many ways. Thaggert looks specifically at African American women, who are often overlooked as workers since the focus is on Pullman Porters.
  
  Initially the railroads had the Jim Crow cars in the front, where smoke from the engine impacted passengers. This was also where men smoked. The ladies’ car, in the back, was for women and their travel companions. However, Black women, even if they paid the fare, were often removed from the ladies’ car by the conductors. Many sued about their treatment. Prominent Black women who are traveling and speaking faced harassment. The gender deference showed White women was not extended to African American women, regardless of social class.
  
  Train stations often had facilities for White men and White women, but a section for Colored people, no gender distinctions for this group. Before trains had kitchens and dining cars, people would eat at the depot when the train stopped. Often these facilities were segregated. However, Black women and men could serve food and coffee from the platform. Waiter carriers, often serving chicken, were a feature of the train station. However, progress was defined as removing these people. Off the platforms, so they had to sell from the train tracks. Eventually these waiter carriers, mostly women were removed. While serving meals was a productive occupation for many Black women, their presence was not appreciated by the railroads.
  
  Pullman maids served on trains, especially caring for women and children. Their actions were tightly controlled as Thaggert assess from employee cards that had information about the women and comments on their behavior. Some had many skills, so could style hair and do manicures for passengers. Just as the Pullman Porters got tips for shining shoes and other activities, these women made tips for services. The women varied in level of educational attainment, but some had nursing skills.
  
  Gender and race really shaped the travel experiences, with there being tension for Black people rather that the simply wondering about where you were going. Behavior for workers and passengers was closely monitored.
  
  
• 
  Sandra

  Miriam Thaggert has written a really interesting account of black women and railroads in the post civil war era through the early 20th century. I really enjoyed the section about Pullman maids because I hadn’t known about them previously, and the chapter about Pauli Murray… I feel like a whole book could be written about them.
  
  The only thing I question about the book is the author’s description of the photo on page 90. The author says the white male is looking at his watch, but to me it appears that he is handing something (perhaps from the tray?) to the white female. This doesn’t really affect the authors argument, however. The book is meticulously researched and noted.
  
  Thaggert mentions work by Psyche A. Williams-Forson, which sounds really interesting and I’ll be looking into that as soon as I can.
• 
  lildebbie57

  I learned a lot from this book. It was very worthwhile for the wealth of content. Reading on my train commute to and from work really put things into perspective. I did find some parts repetitive and disjointed, so it wasn't always the easiest read.