When these stories are told, they tend to center on the men. Between images of striking carpenters, painters, and blacksmiths; charismatic union leaders like Eugene V. Debs and A. Philip Randolph; and sharply dressed porters, the work of women at the Pullman company has remained largely invisible. Even Almont Lindsey’s 1939 article, which focuses particularly on the ways in which paternalism guided the design and management of the company town, has nothing specific to say about the Pullman women. And in some ways, that’s precisely what Pullman would have wanted. Pullman resisted hiring women and did his best to keep attention away from the company’s female employees. Of course, since the beginning, women both defined and defied the social experiment that was Pullman.

In the Shops

As Douglas Pearson Hoover suggests in his thesis “Women in Nineteenth Century Pullman,” the town was planned with the intention that women’s primary role would be “to mother children and raise them in an air of middle-class respectability on a working-class family’s budget.” The homes were designed with domestic work in mind—indoor plumbing, garbage outlets, and a “covered arrangement of clotheslines” in the back. The pedestrian scale of the neighborhood made it possible for men to have lunch at home and find rest in the domestic environment.