“An Emergency Job:” The Conductorettes
Conductorette Mary Brownoff, Badge No.94, pictured on-duty with streetcar motorman Lawrence J. Bertrand, an invalided veteran of the Sicilian Campaign, in October 1944. [Provincial Archives of Alberta Photo No. BL805.3 (cropped)]
Invariably, the story of Canada’s Second World War home-front calls to mind the factories of Toronto, Hamilton, and Montreal, and the Bomb Girls and Bren Gun Gals who called them home. It’s not without reason. By late-1943, ammunition, firearms, and aircraft plants employed approximately 261,000 women, “accounting for more than 30 per cent of the aircraft industry, close to 50 per cent of the employees in many gun plants, and a distinct majority in munitions inspection,” the Canadian Encyclopedia writes.
While the popular narrative of Canada’s wartime heroines focuses on these factory jobs, gainful employment opportunities awaited women across the country. In Edmonton, for instance, women broke into traditionally male-dominated fields like dairy-delivery, bricklaying, railroading, and policing. Two-hundred women enrolled in the first mechanics class offered by Dominion Motors, and some 1,000 others went on to work with Aircraft Repair Ltd., who assembled and repaired craft as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
Through these women, as the popular saying went, “men [were] released for duty,” and while perhaps less important in their propagandistic nature than the workers out east, their jobs proved vital to the war-effort all the same. For Edmontonians, however, the contemporary notoriety of all these new employment streams paled in comparison to one; the Conductorette.
As Canada’s Wartime Prices & Trade Board strictly rationed gasoline and rubber, most Edmontonians turned to the city’s streetcar system for transportation, and by 1943 it handled an average of 22,500,000 passengers annually. The boon, wholly unexpected by transit officials, ironically became an “unwelcome windfall.” Ignoring mounting problems such as worn tracks and maturing rolling stock, the most pressing issue facing the system was a manpower shortage. Many motormen had enlisted for overseas service — those who remained became increasingly burdened in the face of ever growing passenger loads. How could they expect one man to operate their vehicle whilst maintaining order, and distributing and verifying tickets when dozens crowded on at each stop?
If the Edmonton Radial Railway was to survive, City Commissioner R.J. Gibb contended, they would need to hire women to take over some of these responsibilities. In addition to the aforementioned ticket-selling and verifying duties, female “conductorettes” could ensure cabin cleanliness, maintain order, enforce no-smoking rules, handle questions and provide directions, signal commands via the bell, and adjusted trolley poles, thus leaving the male motorman to focus on his primary job; operating the car. Further, their presence, Gibb argued, would hasten boarding and disembarkation times as the car’s rear doors — then used only as emergency exits — could be put into service.
Gibb’s proposal echoed those considered nationwide. On August 11th, 1943, for example, Vancouver’s British Columbia Electric Railway adopted a similar scheme in principle. Vancouverites embraced the idea wholeheartedly, and encouraged by the response, Edmonton’s Street Railway Department followed suit with their own plans on August 18th. As with their coastal contemporaries, Edmonton established a set of guiding principles for new hires. Ideally, they targeted attractive women of middle-class disposition between the ages of twenty-five and forty, with heights between five-feet four inches and five-feet ten inches, and weights between 120 and 160 pounds. Preference was to be given to married women with a husband away overseas.
Initially, the E.R.R. planned for only twenty full-time conductorettes. The announcement, however, “struck a responsive chord within the hearts of many women,” the Edmonton Bulletin asserted, and the Department “was besieged by between thirty and forty women, all clamoring for jobs.” By month’s end, the E.R.R. hired forty female employees, with more following over the coming year as demand increased. In the words of one Bulletin journalist:
“It would appear a run around the town, dressed in a natty uniform, with the clang of the street car bell in her ears and the trammelling crowds engulfing her, is just what many a women has been dreaming of.
“At least it will be a change for harried riders to hear a feminine voice singing out ‘Step well forward in the car, please!’”
Monday, October 4th, 1943, marked the official debut of conductorette service in Edmonton — in E.R.R. Superintendent Thomas Ferrier’s mind, the women’s first day was an “unqualified success.” Passengers were more than accommodating of their new “lady conductors,” and appreciated them both for their practical role and the novelty they provided. “Observers were impressed by the alertness with which the women operated the rear doors and sold tickets,” the Edmonton Journal wrote, and for aging Edmontonians especially, “the double ring to go ahead and the single for a stop were novel [and] recalled the days of 20 to 25 years ago, when all street cars had two-man crews.”
In spite of that, two problems presented themselves immediately. One was that the Street Railway Department had not properly educated the public on which routes conductorettes were serving; its two busiest, the Blue and Blue & White. As a result, “confusion was experienced during the morning rush hours when passengers assembled at the front door of [those streetcars] to enter the vehicle,” the Bulletin explained. “Under the new set up the passengers will be taken on at the rear door, with the front and rear doors being used as exits.” A stop-gap solution — using ‘V for Victory’ placards in cars’ vestibule windows to indicate that those particular vehicles made use of conductorettes — was quickly introduced.
Operational safety was another early concern. Officials failed to recognize the need for railings or hand straps at the conductorettes’ stations which made “their job of keeping their feet on the swaying rear platform more difficult.” Dorothy Brooman, a recent hire, meanwhile, was injured on Tuesday, October 26th, 1943, while trying to adjust a dislocated trolley pole. After climbing part-way up the car, she lost balance and fell, scrapping her knee badly as she hit the pavement. Brooman pushed through and “was able to resume her duties after the accident, which was the city’s first involving a conductorette.”
Despite these early difficulties, the conductorette program thrived and by November forty-five women were stationed along Edmonton’s busiest streetcar routes. Hours varied by line and by season, although most conductorettes typically served during the forenoon and evening rushes. Each woman received fifty-five cents per-hour in addition to supplied uniforms; their winter raiment consisted of “dark blue parkas and ski-type slacks.” In another first, they also received union representation under Amalgamated Association of Street & Electric Railway Employees of America Local Division No. 569, who had, since their founding in 1911, barred women from entering. Personally, J.E. Billingsley, Union President, welcomed their appearance and “commented on the very favourable impression the conductorettes had made on the public patronizing the street railway system.”
Edmonton’s Street Railway Department had fifty-nine female conductors on its payroll by January 1944. That month Superintendent Ferrier again relayed his pleasure “with the way the conductorettes are doing their emergency job,” but continually emphasized that their role was just that — emergency. As early as March the Department began to doubt the program’s viability, and reports suggested that they would only “maintain the conductorette service through the summer [of 1944] if patronage keeps at a level corresponding with months of [the] last year.” Thankfully for the Radial Railway’s conductorettes, patronage exceeded previous expectations.
Detractors of the program, while a minority among transit users, did exist, although most ‘critiques’ were founded in nothing more than sexism. A prime example of this presented itself in an April 1944 meeting of the Federation of Community Leagues. George Shannon, a local delegate, went on a tirade chiding the Street Railway for its continued employment of conductorettes, claiming that “a woman’s place is in the home.” “All kinds of men are out of jobs here — married men — and it’s not right that single girls and married women should be conductorettes.” Operation of a streetcar, motorman, conductor, or otherwise, “is a man’s job,” he sneered.
Conductorettes received disappointing news around that time; the prospect of female motormen and the implementation of “two-woman” cars disappeared. Although Commissioner Gibb had long suggested that “the present women conductorettes on the trams soon will be given the chance to train as tram operators” — so long as they could pass the operational tests and physical requirements expected of their male counterparts — an influx of new applicants, particularly invalided veterans, torpedoed those plans.
Indeed, the prospect of any long-term plans for the conductorettes began to look doubtful. As 1944 turned into 1945, it became increasingly clear that the Second World War was approaching its twilight, and that April the Edmonton Radial Railway announced its intention to phase conductorette service out. The forty-three women still on their payroll, Superintendent Ferrier explained, were to be “released just as quickly as the department could do without them.” Among those immediately laid off were the twelve conductorettes operating along the southside routes. The others quickly followed, and as of April 28th only four women remained on the E.R.R. roster — those hangers-on remained to “[do] such jobs as switching trams at 109 st. and Jasper ave. and selling tickets at busy intersections.”
The Street Railwaymen’s union invited their conductorette sisters to one last meeting on May 28th, 1945. A formal vote of thanks, stating in part that the women proved themselves as “soldiers of real merit on the home front by helping to master successfully a terrific transportation job,” passed unanimously. “If it hadn’t been for their help,” Ferrier added, “our services would have been handicapped greatly.”
That August the Street Railway Department terminated the conductorette program and sent home their last four female employees. “I shall be sorry to see the conductorettes leave,” said Fred Shouldice, a local bookkeeper. “They rendered excellent service and the vast majority of them took a keen interest in their work, and endeavoured in every way to give satisfaction.”
Despite their personal successes, and despite the public’s infatuation with their “lady conductors,” Edmonton Transit forbid women to serve in any meaningful, public-fronting role for another three decades. In the words of a 1967 Edmonton Journal article, officials believed that “It wouldn’t be fair to the fair sex to let them drive anything heavier than a family car.” Only in 1975 did Kathleen Andrews, a British-born, Edmonton-raised transit clerk, break through E.T.S.’ glass ceiling — she became the city’s first female bus-driver that May.
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Author’s Note:
The titles “Edmonton Radial Railway” and “Street Railway Department” are used interchangeably in this piece as they were during the era. While the municipal transportation system’s official title was the former, its position as a department of the City of Edmonton saw it often referred to as the latter, even in official correspondence and documents. This matter resolved itself post-war. With the system moving away from streetcars in favour of busses, the Railway renamed itself to the Edmonton Transportation Service in 1946. The following year it rebranded again into the more familiar Edmonton Transportation System.
Sources:
“BCE to Begin Using Women Conductors,” Vancouver Sun, August 11, 1943.
“City Planning To Use Women As Conductors,” Edmonton Bulletin, August 18, 1943.
“Plan 2-Operator Trams, Conductors To Be Women,” Edmonton Journal, August 18, 1943.
“40 Women Apply Conductor Jobs,” Edmonton Bulletin, August 19, 1943.
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Guy Demarino, “Driving City Buses Is A ‘Men-Only’ Job,” Edmonton Journal, August 30, 1967.
Colin Hatcher & Tom Schwarzkopf, Edmonton’s Electric Transit: The Story of Edmonton’s Streetcars and Trolley Buses (Toronto: Railfare Enterprises, 1983), 109, 115-116.
Catherine C. Cole, “‘Every Kitchen is an Arsenal’: Women’s War on the Home Front in Northern Alberta” in For King and Country, ed. Ken Tingley (Edmonton: Provincial Museum of Alberta, 1995), 177.
Robert Collins, “As the war became real, Albertans hurled themselves into the cause” in Alberta in the 20th Century: Volume VII (1939-45): The War That United The Province, ed. Ted Byfield (Edmonton: United Western Communications Ltd., 1998), 118, 156.
Ken Tingly, Ride of the Century: The Story of the Edmonton Transit System (Edmonton: City of Edmonton, 2011), 122.
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https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/women-and-war#
Laurie Callsen, “Edmonton's World War II Heroines,” Edmonton City As A Museum Project, August 29, 2014,
https://citymuseumedmonton.ca/2014/08/29/edmontons-world-war-ii-heroines/.
