It wasn’t uncommon for women to travel alone via railroad in the late 19th century in both Europe and the United States, though there certainly was a kind of cultural fear of what could happen to women in the public sphere. It’s typically accepted by historians that social and gender relations in many parts of Europe at the time were understood through a division between a “public” (male) sphere and a “private” (predominately female) sphere. The former encompassed the realms of politics and business, among other things, while the latter encompassed domesticity. There’s been quite a bit of work both explaining and challenging this theory, so I won’t go into detail on it here. It suffices to mention that by the late 19th century in Europe, there was a very strong notion among well-to-do individuals that a respectable woman’s place in society was as the “angel of the house” - the moral arbiter of the family within the private space of the home, which served as a respite from the public world.^1
The issue with railroad travel was that it represented a situation in which the line between those two spheres became blurry. Train cars were public spaces in the sense that one was required to share them with strangers, but the intimacy of the environment created a kind of semi-private space. Concerns arose over both the ways in which women should conduct themselves within these spaces and their potential safety while riding on trains. We do have sources that show us women could easily travel alone for specific purposes. Amy Richter’s Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity mentions one instance of a woman named Meta Du Pont Coleman who traveled annually between 1879 and 1898 from her home in Louisville, Kentucky to Wilmington, Delaware in order to visit family. In one letter to her grandmother reassuring of her safety, she writes, “I hope the two postals have reached you, and that you will realize how easy it is to travel alone” (36).
However, we have many, many more representations in magazines and newspapers of manifested fears about women traveling on railroads, particularly when it came to their sexual vulnerability. This cartoon from Currier & Ives, entitled “A Kiss in the Dark” (1881), shows an unscrupulous man attempting to steal a kiss from the woman seated behind him when passing through a dark tunnel.^2 One conductor described what he called “The Magazine Route” - a purported technique of seduction where men would offer a magazine to young women to read on the train and then return later to ask if they had enjoyed it, eventually offering to dine with them in another car (this is quoted in Richter, 39). Several newspapers and guides warned women against “nomadic flirtations” when traveling alone lest their sexual virtue should be compromised.
It’s worth pointing out two things, however. Firstly, these stories are more indicative of the people who tell and consume them than they are of actual events on trains. It’s difficult, if not impossible for us to know if there really were cadres of casanovas combing the train cars to seduce unescorted women. What matters is that people at the time thought there might be, and they acted based on that fear. Secondly, it’s notable that fears about traveling with strangers weren’t confined to potential dangers for women. There were fears that travel in a confined, semi-private space with strangers could range from awkward to life-threatening regardless of someone’s gender. The British satirical rag Punch has a ton of cartoons lampooning the social awkwardness of train travel. This one from 1856 comically advises passengers that the best way to ensure a car to yourself is to act like you’re traveling with a baby (the logic being, of course, no one wants to travel with a noisy infant), whereas this one from 1866 pokes fun at an upper-class gentleman who refuses to ride in a car with “horrid old women” and “screaming children.”
Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century is one of the best-known books about cultural attitudes toward European railroad travel, and he has an entire chapter on travel within the compartments themselves. The book is much more focused on the way in which railroad travel changed people’s perception of space and time, but for the purposes of this question there’s one aspect of that transformation that we should be interested in: the question of whether or not to socialize with strangers. Most early rail cars in Europe had seating that was arranged like a horse-drawn coach (i.e. you couldn’t switch compartments while the train was moving). On most long journeys before the railroad, it wasn’t uncommon to get to know your fellow travelers, as you’d be with them for some time.^3 The railroad, according to Schivelbusch, changed that. One Frenchman was quoted as remarking in 1857:
In the coach, conversation got off to an easy start after a few moments of preliminary study of one’s companions; at the moment of parting, one oftentimes regretted the brevity of the journey, having almost made friends. How different it is on the train! (quoted in Schivelbusch, 74).
Most people on the train elected not to speak with their neighbors, but this presented a problem: seating was still arranged in the style of a coach, face-to-face to facilitate conversation. One criticism in an 1838 issue of Railway Times called for a different arrangement to alleviate the problem:
With reference to the interior arrangement of Railway Carriages…I beg to suggest…to the public, whether their comfort could not be promoted, by having some of them, in each train, fitted up, so that the passengers should sit back to back, and look out upon the country, from a range of windows the whole length of the carriage…surely, this would be pleasanter than a three or four hours’ study of physiognomy at a stretch for want of any better occupation (76).
Without redesigning train cars, though, the most common way middle-class people dealt with this problem is by picking up reading material before the journey. By the late 19th century, reading on the train was a common practice and shops sold materials of all kinds in every train station.^4 This 1883 cartoon from Punch pokes fun at the proliferation of things available for purchase at the station: the cartoon shows the station saturated in advertisements and the text reads, “Railway Puzzle: To find the name of the station.”
However, there were actually instances where the intimate space of the train car could prove fatal, as a few murders that occurred within train cars became sensationalized in the mid-19th century. Schivelbusch mentions one in particular printed the Annales d’Hygiène Publique n 1861: the murder of Chief Justice Poinsot on a train from Mulhouse to Paris:
The ensuing investigation revealed that he had shared his compartment with a single fellow passenger, his murderer. No trace of the latter was found. The case aroused unusual interest. “The painful interest excited in Paris b the dreadful death of M. Poinsot has been extraordinarily great,” Galignani’s Messenger, an English-language newspaper published in Paris, reported on 9 December, “and a certain feeling of uneasiness has arisen at the idea of the extreme facility with which the crime appears to have been perpetrated” (80).
The reaction to this story and the idea that one might be sharing a train compartment with a murderer was, again, something that revealed the quirks of this new kind of travel much more than the actual reality, but it was an idea that popped up both in cautionary tales and humorous depictions.^5 This other cartoon from an 1864 issue of Punch advises passengers in tongue-in-cheek fashion to use that idea to their advantage should they want a car to themselves to smoke in.
On a final note, many of the things I describe above are going to be class-specific. Working class people typically didn’t make longer voyages by train (though taking a short holiday was within the means of many working-class families by the early 20th century), and second-class cars were a different kind of travel experience.
TL;DR: Yes, women could and would travel alone by train in the 19th century, but there was a certain uneasiness about train travel in general (and solitary women specifically) due to the values of the time.
I came across an account of trial in the matter of attempted rape, which took place in England in about 1860-70. The woman had been in the same compartment as the man, and had avoided rape by getting out of the carriage door. The man had held on to her hand to stop her falling while the train was at speed, but in consequence was unable to re-button his fly, which was found to be "three parts undone" when the train stopped at the station.
The reason that the woman had not gone out into the corridor of the carriage was that at the time compartments on that line were generally individual, with access only from the platform. This implies that he had not entered the compartment during the journey, but that at some stage they had both voluntarily entered the compartment at a station, suggesting that it was socially acceptable.
I'll delete this if anything more substantial comes up.
I am currently reading a fascinating account of a woman's travels through Northern America in the mid 19th century. You can read it for free here: "A woman's wanderings in the western world". Although it's not Europe, you definitely get references from her travels there. Full disclosure, she is from a wealthy family. At times she is traveling with "commoners" and at other times she gets the full regal treatment. It reeks with classism but just "hearing" how appalled she is at certain situations (and those brutish Americans!) is a pure joy to read. Above all, it has great historical references and personal accounts of the social and political climate, not to mention "lost" vocabulary and colloquialisms that had me reaching for the dictionary many times.
