Hidden histories: Ben Reitman and the 'outcast' women behind 'Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha'

This dissertation offers the first study of a misunderstood text, Sister of the Road: the Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha (1937). Section I, an analysis of the previously undocumented interconnections of Sister of the Road and of the collected papers of Dr. Ben Reitman, demonstrates that the book is a complex, intertextual puzzle assembled by Reitman, a Chicago-based tramp, physician, amateur sociologist, and former partner of anarchist Emma Goldman. The book, like its protagonist, is an elaborate pastiche of texts and lives reflected in Reitman's Papers, a vast collection reflecting his fascination with himself and with marginal individuals he termed "social outcasts." In Section II, I examine the role in Bertha's story of Reitman's own autobiography, apparent only on considering the book in the context of his body of writing. Bertha consists in part of a covert presentation of Reitman's entanglement in conflicts of the day around gender, class and sexuality. This study of Reitman in the context of the cultural transformations of his era shows how he expressed via Bertha a profound ambivalence about cultural changes associated with modern, urban twentieth-century society: a contemporary crisis of masculinity, the growth of a homosexual subculture and of homophobia, and the emergence of the social sciences to address "outcast" or deviant populations. Section III is a collective biography of five real-life women written into Sister of the Road. In order to transcend Reitman's framework for "the" text, I conducted research well beyond the reaches of his papers to inform vignettes of the lives and subcultures of particular women I identified "behind" the book: an anarchist free-lover, a pickpocket, a bohemian poet, a labor radical, and a lesbian activist. In sum, analysis of Sister of the Road in terms of its subterranean connections to a multitude of lives and texts, rather than as prima facie evidence, reveals (1) Reitman's place in its characters and composition, as well as (2) rich evidence about women in the nether regions of early-twentieth century society, material of interest to feminist historians which has been obscured by positing Bertha's existence.