A Ladies Only sign from the National Railway Museum collection
There has been a remarkable flurry of interest in women,
safety, and the railway this summer. Recent revelations from the British Transport
Police that sexual offenses were up 21% for the 2013-2014 period was dredged
back up to provide the underpinning for discussions and opinion pieces on
sexual harassment and safety on the Underground, the railways, and public
transport in general. The debate reached a peak with Jeremy Corbyn’s
announcement that he would consider introducing Ladies Only carriages if
elected, possibly responding to a demand created by the coverage of Ladies Only
compartments on Indian railways in the BBC’s recent World’s Busiest Railway.
Given the public interest surrounding the subject, it seems
apt to consider why Ladies Only carriages and compartments vanished from
Britain’s railways. Simon Abernathy has already offered up an excellent study
of the problems of reintroduction. This blog is covers why they vanished from
the lines in the first place.
A feature of British railways right from the start, by the
1850s South Eastern already had a
rule stating that ‘A carriage is always reserved for ladies if required’. By
1900 most companies pre-grouping were reserving a compartment on a three or
four coach train for Ladies Only, and longer trains could feature an entire
carriage for Ladies Only, situated next to the Guard Van for security. All
companies, it seems, also offered a service on request, where female passengers
could ask a guard to designate a compartment Ladies Only. South Railways Magazine featured a charming story from 1929 where a
male passenger took a woman’s seat by dumping her bag out of it whilst she left
to buy a newspaper. When challenged, by both passenger and guard to relinquish
the seat he refused with ‘Unwritten law be hanged. I am here and here I stay’.
The guard, looking around and seeing the other three passengers were ladies,
left and then returned with a paper sign that he hung on the window reading “For
Ladies Only”. The male passenger, to a ‘murmur of approval’ from the crowd on
the platform, was forced to vacate. Ladies Only was not the only by-request
service offered by the companies. London,
Chatham and Dover, for instance, kept a supply of cushions and blankets
that could be reserved by female passengers.
From the start, however, Ladies Only was beset by problems. The
chief among these was that women seemed reluctant to use them. A Board of Trade
inquiry found that, in 1887, the vast majority of the services were underused. Great Western informed the inquiry that
it had set aside 1060 seats for women but only 248 had been taken up, whereas
over 5000 women had made use of the smoking carriages instead. ‘The average
women does not greatly care for these reserved compartments’ mused the Railway Gazette in 1917. Popular with
some women travelling alone and mothers or nurses with children, Ladies Only
compartments and carriages meant a separation for those women travelling with
menfolk or those who wanted to smoke en-route.
The closed compartment - the source of so much railway anxiety
They also did not prevent the problems of sexual harassment and
violence. Ladies Only carriages reached centre-stage during periods of moral
panic, as David Turner has pointed out, usually focused on famous outrages on the railways. The murder of the 55
year old war-time nurse Florence Nightingale Shore in 1920, on a trip to the south
coast, was particularly shocking. Discovered in third-class compartment
unconscious and bloodied, Ms Shore’s attacker was never caught, having slipped
off the train at Bexhill without being seen. A decorated nurse, the press was
up in arms and questions were asked in Parliament. There had been, though, the
Minister of Transport revealed, a Ladies Only carriage. Ms Shore had simply not
availed herself of it. Even using the Ladies Only was not a sure-fire way of
avoiding harassment. The general excitement surrounding the introduction of the
mini-skirt saw many drivers on the Great
Eastern develop a scheme where they pulled the train into the station so as
the Ladies Only carriage was raised up from the platform. This allowed the “helpful”
guards to alight and lift the young ladies into the carriage. ‘Once the skirt
became established fashion attire, the novelty soon wore off and the ladies
were left alone’ recalled one driver ‘but it was a bit of innocent fun while it
lasted. Like all good pranks, it lost its humour if you didn’t know when to
stop’.
Just as Simon has observed that the ‘travel in a ladies-only carriage or you deserve what
you get’ attitude lingers around such carriages, so too did the stigma
of the Ladies Only carriage stick to the women who used it. Kim Stevenson, in
her work on women’s safety on the Victorian railways, discusses an 1879
magazine article that argued that at least one fifth of indecent assault cases
(which for the Victorians covered everything from sexual harassment to rape)
were fictitious or overblown, and were attempts to entrap men for blackmail
purposes. Travel outside of the Ladies Own, it essentially argued, and the
women you encountered were morally suspect. Yet travelling in the carriages
brought its own set of labels. Railway
Gazette, a publication we should remember written by and aimed at a largely
male readership, depicted those who used them as ‘nervous women of all ages and
mothers of innumerable babies’. Travel inside the Ladies Own, in contrast, and
you were a frail and nervous woman.
'The First "Ladies Only" Compartment'
William Heath Robinson 1935
Railway Gazette, however, also raised a serious point –
writing in 1917 they observed that there was, simply, no point in Ladies Own.
The demands of war work, and the influx of women into the transport system
during working hours, meant labelling only one carriage in three or four Ladies
Only was a futile effort. Demand was outstripping supply. By the 1970s, when
Ladies Only carriages were being pulled out of service, they were already seen
as an anachronism. A relic of the past. In 1979 Felicity Green, the Managing
Director of Vidal Sassoon, wrote into The
Times and complained about sexual discrimination on-board British Airways.
There had been about one hundred male passengers, Green wrote, but only two
female. Her issue was not the disparity, however, but that BA had segregated
her and the other women in one part of the plane. ‘Why was I denied the
stimulus of talking my way across the Atlantic with any member of the opposite
sex, many of whom, in this case, I happen to know personally?’ she asked. In 1917
the Railway Gazette had argued that
barring women from the smoking carriages would upset men ‘torn between the
desire for tobacco and female society’. By 1979 women’s voices appeared more
stridently in favour of not being excluded from general society in public
transport. ‘I’m not a sex maniac, merely an integrated member of the travelling
public who wishes to remain so. More so’ Green concluded. Ladies Only
floundered as sexual discrimination legislation came in in the 1970s, many
commentators in newspapers and magazines arguing (erroneously) that the acts
would require companies to establish Men Only carriages as well. By 1977 British Railways were stripping their
signs from carriages across the country.
By the 1980s
Ladies Only carriages were being decried as relics of the forgotten past
already. ‘Maud Cook can remember when there were carriages for women only on
British trains’ ran a Times article
in 1982. Susan Marling’s piece, actually a supportive one about Cook’s efforts
to establish Ladies Only buses in London, still couldn’t resist a dig at Ladies
Only waiting rooms with their ‘slight smell of musty cats’. The cat, long
associated with the socially-awkward spinster in comedy culture, harked back to
the nervous women of the 1917 piece.
This piece has
eschewed a discussion of economic reasons for social and cultural ones. This is
not a sin of omission– ongoing changes in British society did away with the Ladies
Only carriages much more effectively than the beleaguered accountants at British Railways could have done. The move from close compartment (think Hogwarts Express for the uninitiated) to the open carriage we know today was thought by many men and women at the time to have eliminated the need for protection. Men wouldn't harass women in public, the argument went, and this idea helped govern BR policy. Changing
attitudes towards women, and the changing place of women in society, helped
reshape rail travel. Yet this is not a simple Whiggish story of liberal
progress writ-large. From a historical perspective such an attitude solidifies the image of women as passengers - passive and removed from the work of the railways they did so much to enhance. Socially, it excludes questions of class and social background. Changes were opposed, and some women benefitted more than
others from the abandonment of Ladies Own. Green herself admitted that in her
opinion ‘the exclusive band of females lucky enough to travel Concorde are
really not the same species as those who object to the demise of “ladies own”’,
suggestive, in 1979, of attitudes in the decade to come. Some women clearly
benefitted from Ladies Only, whilst others did not use the service at all, yet
across the board social attitudes were changing. Not necessarily all together,
nor by any means in the same direction, but by the 1970s and 1980s Ladies Only was,
clearly, a musty piece of the past for many British women. The problems faced
by female commuters and travellers today demand answers. But they are not, as
this piece has tried to show, that different from those faced by women in the
past. Problems that, between the 1840s and 1970s, Ladies Only failed to solve.If any further proof is needed, see the reverse image of the Ladies Only sign that started this blog below:
Just for the Ladies:
Inside the carriage and on the back of the Ladies Only sign?
An advert for disinfectant