| This dissertation examines the contours and contexts of women's railroad work during the First World War. It explores the social, political, economic, and cultural changes which facilitated women's entrance into a traditionally masculine working environment and the effects of that entrance on workplace gender dynamics. Using a wide range of evidence including cartoons, poems, statistics, and women's personal testimony, the dissertation examines the active, fluid, and contested processes through which gender was created, recreated, and understood in the railway world. It argues that women's presence in the workplace was culturally disruptive and that participants in the railway world understood a number of workplaces changes through the prism of gender. This created tensions between female and male workers and served to limit women's access to railroad jobs. The dissertation concludes that because railroad officials remained ideologically committed to the idea of the railroads as a masculine domain, when the war ended, women were pushed out of the workplace as the railroad company actively, albeit incompletely, reasserted prewar gender norms. |
