On the Railroad
At the Pullman shops, the women wage-earners were almost exclusively white, many of them European immigrants. But the Pullman company was also one of the largest employers of Black workers in the country. Those workers were chiefly Pullman Porters, smartly dressed and highly professional men who provided service on the trains that matched the railcar’s opulence and comfort. For decades, these services were provided only by Black men, but at the turn of the century, the Pullman company began to offer maids on their cars as an additional level of luxury to passengers.
Like the porters, Pullman maids were Black, and their work had uncomfortable ties to the labor of the enslaved. In fact, as Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. points out, the introduction of Pullman maids was a return to a similar service offered by rail lines during the antebellum years. “At least two antebellum lines, the Richmond & Danville and the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore, assigned maids to passenger trains, [enslaved women] to staff the ladies’ cars on the former line and probably free black women to work on sleeping cars for the latter.” Pullman maids worked long-distance trips and, much like their porter counterparts, were expected to “keep passengers’ rooms tidy, collect trash, remake beds, repair garments, and perform other personal service.” Maids were expected to give free manicures or style hair whenever time allowed, and they were paid “less than $80 a month in the 1920s.”
While the maids performed similar work to the porters, their struggles were often greater. Both positions relied on tips to make a decent wage, but since their clientele were “women, the elderly, and the infirm,” Kornweibel notes, maids made less than the porters, “who rubbed shoulders with…businessmen, politicians, actors, and sports stars.” And when the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was fighting for better conditions, the maids were eventually dropped from the official name in favor of having them join the Ladies’ Auxiliaries, whose members were mostly porters’ wives. As a result, the needs of the porters took precedence over the maids in negotiations with the company.
Worse still was the position of the car cleaners. Many Black women found work cleaning the interiors of Pullman cars, “sweeping up trash and litter; mopping floors; disinfecting spittoons; cleaning hoppers (toilets); brushing seats; washing windows; dusting woodwork; cleaning carpets by hand, on one’s knees; and polishing metal surfaces.” These jobs were difficult and paid little, but since employment options were limited for Black women, they made up the overwhelming majority of the Pullman company’s car cleaning workforce in the southern car yards.
New Work for the Modern Woman
In the early twentieth century, more women took roles as clerks, secretaries, and salespeople. When the company installed a new switchboard in the early 1920s, they hired a handful of telephone operators, who could collectively handle an impressive 850 calls a day. Of course, along with most industries, the gendered boundaries of work unraveled during the world wars. The Pullman factory in Chicago pivoted to help the war effort, building troop and hospital cars, as well as aircraft, tanks, and shells. Here, women stepped in as welders and riveters, and other jobs that men had left vacant when they went to fight overseas.