Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Working Class in American History)

Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Working Class in American History)
by Melinda Chateauvert

Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Working Class in American History)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Melinda Chateauvert
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1997-12-01
ISBN: 0252066367
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Book Reviews of Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Working Class in American History)

Book Review: MARCHING TOGETHER or trailing behind?
Summary: 2 Stars

Mentally reviewing Chateauvert's book, my first impression is that its thesis belies its title. One of the several points made by the author is that the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters never permitted its women's auxiliary any sort of equality with it. The Brotherhood may have used its auxiliary as a tool but always remained "the boss" and, when it no longer felt the auxiliary organization to be useful, abolished it. Even the women's own perceptions and goals supported supremacy of their husbands over their own unperceived rights as individual workers. No, there was definitely no "marching together," the title notwithstanding. The Brotherhood was always in the lead and the "little woman" was respectfully trailing behind.

Beyond the misleading title, Chateauvert makes a number of historically accurate observations, none of which are surprising given the social and cultural beliefs and attributes of the era:
- Both the Pullman Company and the railroads as employers were totally segregated along racial lines and did not afford their black employees any sort of equality with whites in terms of job assignments, pay scales, promotions, levels of authority, rest periods, or any other aspect of employment, hardly a surprising revelation in the early to mid-twentieth century United States.
- This discriminatory treatment led to the gradual formation of the first black labor union in the nation.
- The union itself, however, was blind to its own highly discriminatory practices, being just as intractable where the sex of employees was concerned as were the railroads where race was the factor, dropping the word "maids" from its official name early on and essentially ignoring the problems of female sleeping car workers.
- Despite their treatment by the union as "second class citizens," the wives of porters supported the Brotherhood by encouraging porters to join, collecting dues, and holding organizational meetings.
- The wives themselves felt that they would achieve higher social standing not by their own work but through their husbands' increased union wages, for those would enable them to leave a workforce where women did not belong and become full time housewives, which was the status to which they aspired. Strange though such a concept seems today, it was prevalent through much of the twentieth century.

While these and similar observations are accurate enough, they will come as no surprise to anyone who has either lived through or studied the culture of the United States as it persisted through the past century. From this perspective, it does not appear as though Chateauvert has added anything to our existing body of knowledge. Even though her book may be redundant so far as revelatory material goes, yet it might still have made a contribution had its readability, wit, charm, or other attribute encouraged the public to savor it. Unfortunately, the writing is deadly dull and highly repetitious.

Almost as bad as its plodding, uninspired style is the fact that the text contains a number of grammatical errors. The author repeatedly uses the present tense verb "forbid" where the past tense "forbade" is obviously called for. On page 37, she writes of a "principle organizing strategy" where the adjective should have been "principal," an error repeated on page 145. On page 106, she coins the adjective "confrontative" although the language already has a recognized word for that purpose, "confrontational." Ten pages further on, we wonder if she understands the basics of railroad technology even though the railroad industry underlies the organization about which she is writing, for she misapplies the word "locomotive," limiting it purely to steam-powered locomotives although the term applies equally to diesel-electric power, which she names an "engine." One page later, she refers to the operating trades as "operative" job classes, further revealing her lack of knowledge of railroad occupations. Her constant, sophomoric use of the term "lily-white" to describe segregated unions, while accurate enough, becomes annoying through unimaginative repetition. On page 170, the ordnance (i.e., munitions) industry is misnamed the "ordinance industry." Only twelve pages later, she appears to confuse "sufferance" for "suffrage," the application of voting power.

In brief, MARCHING TOGETHER appears flawed in that it neither offers new information on social and economic conditions of twentieth-century United States society nor presents well-known data in a new and interesting manner. The book may have value to historians of organized labor (although there were never more than 1500 members of the BSCP women's auxiliary) and perhaps to sociologists who wish to collect further examples of race and sex-related discrimination during the time period under examination. Unhappily, I can find little else to recommend it. Readers who are particularly interested in the formation of the first black labor union and its contribution to the United States Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s will find RISING FROM THE RAILS: PULLMAN PORTERS AND THE MAKING OF THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS by Larry Tye a more informative source than Chateauvert's book.
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