Helena Wojtczak

I can honestly say that this is one of the best true crime books I've ever read -- top 5, at least -- and at last count I've read 400 of them.

The author's meticulously footnoted research has demolished dozens of myths about Chapman, many of them a century old. (Even my beloved Philip Sugden made mistakes when talking about the case in his book The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. It's okay, Mr. Sugden. I forgive you.) Her arguments have convinced me once and for all of the answer to the "Was he Jack the Ripper?" question.

More to the point, Wojtczak convinces me that Chapman poisonings were a fascinating case of serial murder in their own right. And she supplies a convincing motive, something I'd never been able to make my mind up on until now.

I am totally floored by this book, both as true crime and as history. If you are a Jack the Ripper hobbyist, this ought to be required reading. If you just like true crime, especially historical crime, I strongly recommend this book as well.… (plus d'informations)

I came across this book through a recommendation in the LibraryThing Railroad group. Thanks, JohnTheFireman!

Before becoming a full-time historian, author and publisher, Helena Wojtczak worked for twenty years as a guard on Southern Region (as far as she knows, she was the first woman to work as a guard for British Rail after the Sex Discrimination Act became law in 1975). This comprehensive history of women workers on Britain's railways is clearly a labour of love for her, and the fruit of many years of research in primary sources and interviews with former railway workers and their families.

The broad outlines of the story are probably familiar to everyone interested in railway history. In the Victorian and Edwardian period, women were confined to low-paid jobs considered "appropriate" to them (catering, cleaning, laundering, etc.). By 1914 there were also considerable numbers working in low-level clerical jobs (typists, telephone operators...). During the two World Wars, large numbers of women were taken on temporarily in "male" jobs (porters, ticket collectors, workshop fitters...) to replace men serving in the armed forces. (Personal interest here: my own grandmother worked for the Lancs and Yorks during World War I.) In 1919 and 1945, they were politely thanked and sent home again. In the sixties and seventies, we all became more enlightened, and with a lot of grumbling the railway industry complied with equal pay and sex discrimination legislation, and opened formerly male grades to female applicants.

Wojtczak fills in a lot of fine detail in this picture, giving us the stories of many individual women who worked on the railways in various capacities, the problems they encountered, and the pleasure many of them took in their work. Obviously the many wartime photographs of women smiling as they clip tickets or clean carriages are at least partly propaganda (as Wojtczak admits, women who grumbled about their war-work would have been unlikely to be mentioned in the newspapers), but it is clear from the interviews and letters she quotes that many women who worked on the railways in waritme really appreciated the variety, physical challenges, responsibility, contact with the public, and camaraderie.

The case-studies she quotes in the later chapters of the book, of women who worked in previously all-male jobs from the late seventies onwards, tell a rather different story. Almost all of them (especially those who worked as guards or drivers) describe encountering hostility and suspicion from male colleagues, experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace, and being treated as troublemakers by management if they complained about inadequate facilities (for understandable reasons, there is a very long list of pages under the heading "toilets" in the index). Possibly these case-studies are not representative: because railway companies won't in general let their employees talk to the press, the extended case studies all come from women who have left the industry, mostly unwillingly and as a direct or indirect result of a dispute with management.

Wojtczak also tells us a lot about the background to the various changes in employment practices. What particularly struck me was that for much of the period, the most vociferous opposition to women working on the railways came not from the management but from male railway workers and the unions that represented them. Before equal pay came in, it was much cheaper to employ women than men (not only did they get lower wages, but they also missed out on many of the additional benefits and allowances that men got). It was thus potentially very much in the companies' interest to take on women instead of men. The unions insisted on equal pay for women war workers in "male grades" to discourage the companies from employing women. Once the war was over, the unions put a lot of pressure on the employers to sack women workers, even when they had proved themselves competent and were keen to stay on. Wojtczak reproduces a wide selection of misogynistic letters and cartoons from union publications and the BR house paper RailNews. NUR president Jimmy Thomas gets a particularly hard time, but we are also reminded that even the relatively "woman-friendly" clerical workers' union, the RCA (later TSSA), paid its female staff less than men, and as late as 1950 still dismissed a female employee when she married. Both unions frequently seem to have made agreements on pay and working conditions that sacrificed the interests of women. Wojtczak isn't able to say much against ASLEF, as they managed to keep women out of the grades they represented altogether until fairly recent times, and thus had no female members to betray.

Despite all this, the book doesn't come across as an attack on the male sex. Men, collectively or individually, are responsible for many of the bad things that happen to women in the course of the story, but Wojtczak recognises that in most cases this is the result of unthinking acceptance of the prevalent cultural values of the time. The most important purpose of the book is to celebrate and put on record the often hidden and forgotten contribution railwaywomen have made over the last 150 years or so. Few railway histories say anything about women, other than to reproduce a picture of female ticket collectors during one or other war - the author points out that even Bagwell's monumental history of the NUR, The Railwaymen, only has a couple of passing references to women: this book is a valuable corrective to that attitude, and should have a place in any library focussing on British social or transport history.

The book is self-published (it won the title of Best Self-Published Book 2006-7), and the editing and design are to a very high standard. There are a few very minor editorial slips - small typos, a couple of places where rearrangement has left the same sentence in two different sections of a chapter. A few scanned documents show nasty jpg artefacts, but the black-and-white photographs are generally reproduced very well.

Excerpts, a selection of reviews, and additional material about railwaywomen are available on the author's website: www.railwaywomen.co.uk… (plus d'informations)