Trunks, Trains, and “Ladies”
While writing my non-fiction work, “Love’s Young Dream,” I thought often of my grandmother. Her name was Allen Palmer House (named in memory of her father who died shortly before she was born).
She once related to me this story.
She was traveling as a young woman on the train. She was a teenager, so this would have been between 1910 and 1920. She was born in 1898. She was sent to Baltimore, Maryland to what they used to call “finishing school.” Hers was The Girls Latin School of Baltimore. Finishing school was a place for upper and upper middle class girls to receive some higher education and additional training in home economics. The trunk she used to travel with is a rather large, decorative, painted trunk that currently sits in the master bedroom at our vacation house. Every time I see that trunk, I think of this story.
She was on the train, riding alone, on her journey to her finishing school in Baltimore. While riding, a strange man walked by her seat and dropped a note in her lap! She was, of course, a “lady,” and for a stranger to drop a note in her lap was expressly inappropriate in such a day and age. Grandma told me that she did not dare to even touch the note. She raised her hand and called for the attendant on the train. It was he who retrieved the note and dealt with the situation.
There is no more, I’m afraid, to that memory that Grandma told me. I wish I could remember more of the details. Mostly, it is simply a reflection of manners and mores at the time. It would be interesting to think about life during that time for Grandma. A teenaged girl, sent by her well-to-do mother and grandmother from Tennessee to Baltimore, on the train, alone with her large trunk of belongings, and her French and Latin books. Alone on the train, a stranger wishing to, what we might today say, “hook up with” her, drops a note in her lap. Was she a little scared? Was she absolutely petrified? Did she feel safe and sufficiently protected with the attendant and others on the train? What did they do to the stranger, if anything? Did they kick him off the train at the next stop? Did Grandma continue to have to see him on the train as they traveled?
The roles of and expectations for women have changed dramatically since Grandma was a teenager in the 1910s. My fantasy fiction, Heirs to the Taxiarch, set in a world that is similar to our own in some ways, in part reflects on the roles of women. Character Lyndz, a well-to-do young woman from a small provincial town, progresses over time away from the traditional female norms into which she was brought up into a woman of fearless leadership and heroism.