Women worked on the railroads, too. That's a fact.
But, according to historian and railroad photographer Shirley Burman, it's a little-publicized fact. So Burman, 61, has made it a crusade to educate the public about women's historical significance in building and maintaining American railroads.Burman, of Sacramento, has worked 16 years accumulating artifacts and photographs documenting women railroaders' work.
Her collection includes everything from photographs of dungaree-clad women covered in grease and soot wiping down steam engines during World War I to memorabilia surrounding the pristine and proper Harvey Girls.
Burman's research is "absolutely marvelous and is pioneering work," says Bill Withuhn, curator of transportation collections for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who is considering using a portion of her collection in an exhibit. Burman started her research after working for the California State Parks system documenting restoration work and creating exhibits at the State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Her interest was piqued after seeing no pictures of women and no books on the subject of women.
Soon after leaving that job, she married professional railroad photographer Richard Steinheimer and became even more passionate about pursuing her research.
"I wanted to know more about the women I was seeing in my husband's pictures," she says. "So as I started asking questions about women's involvement historically, these railroad companies started sending me some of their historical photographs."
Her research uncovered women working as ladies' rail car attendants as early as 1838. She found that the first female telegraphers, with offices typically in train depots, were working by 1850. She gathered information on the Harvey Girls, the young women whose spotless reputations spawned the popular Judy Garland movie of the same name.
"In 1876, Fred Harvey had an agreement with Santa Fe to provide nice hotels along rail routes with good food," explains Burman, who also lectures on the subject and has a stock photography business with her husband.
"The girls who were hired as waitresses and hostesses could wear no makeup or jewelry and were closely supervised. Men came from miles around to meet these girls."
The 1900 Census showed women working as brakemen, switchmen and freight clerks. In these years, before women could legally vote, they even held positions as firemen and engineers.
More than 100,000 women worked in the railroad industry during World War I, taking over the dirtiest and most physical of jobs in the train yards.
By World War II, when Rosie the Riveter beckoned women to war-industry jobs, the number of women working on the railroad had doubled.
In 1943, the Pennsylvania Railroad sought women workers with an ad picturing a mature woman in work clothes. The copy read: "We feel sure the American public will take pride in the way American womanhood has pitched in to keep the Victory trains rolling."
"Around that time, though, many states like California started passing laws protecting women," says Burman. These laws commonly prohibited women from jobs requiring them to lift more than 25 pounds or from working long shifts.
"They said it was because those jobs would ruin our reproductive organs. So women were prohibited from working in jobs that usually paid more."
Using her research collection, Burman put together an exhibit that has stayed in constant demand. Her first exhibit is now a permanent fixture at San Diego's railroad museum in Balboa Park, but she created two new exhibits that have circulated to such museums such as the Baltimore Railroad Museum, the New York Transit Museum and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
To fund her purchases of artifacts and historical items for exhibits, she started Burman Enter-prises, a small mail-order company offering everything from mugs to T-shirts with a "women and the railroad" theme.
With her husband, she wrote a book called "Whistles Across the Land" (Cedco Publishing, $19.95) and co-authored a children's book, "She's Been Working on the Railroad: The Women's Untold Story," which will be published in October by Lodestar Books.
Despite her various business dealings, she laughs at the idea of profiting from her research.
Firmly ensconced in her railroad memorabilia-cluttered home, an older house in an older part of Sacramento where she has lived for 30 years, Burman frankly admits her only goal is to earn enough to fund ongoing research.
"It's a fragmented history," she says. "Nobody has collected any of this and put it in one location. So I've done this with the idea that when it's all completed it will all go intact to an institution that would promote women's history."
And the end, Burman adds, is still nowhere in sight. "You get so fascinated that you just keep going. I've got a tiger by the tail and I can't let go."