Abstract:
People derive meaning from their work, but what happens when the nature of that work changes? Over the late nineteenth century, American railwaymen embraced the dangerous nature of railroading and risk-taking as sources of masculine identity. However, as accident tolls mounted over the 1890s and early in the twentieth century, railroad unions, middle-class reformers, and figures within state and federal government worked to pass laws that made railroad work safer. In so doing, though, safety legislation narrowed the scope for manly risk-taking in the workplace. Part of the transition from the older nineteenth century Victorian moral-political order based in laissez faire liberalism and free labor ideology to the 'new' liberalism of the modern era with its emphasis on social responsibility, positive government, and organizational regulation, state protections for railroaders' physical welfare forced these workers to revise their understandings of themselves as masculine beings.
