Underground Woman: My Four Years As a New York City Subway Conductor by Marian Swerdlow

From the Publisher

Take a wild ride through the New York City subway system with author Marian Swerdlow, one of the first women subway conductors. In the days when subway cars were canvas for graffiti murals and there were no toilets for women employees, Swerdlow trained in Manhattan's underworld of tunnels and learned how to cope with the accompanying dangers and frustrations. Her fascinating insider's account from four years on the job is laden with anecdotes that range from the funny to the painful to the absurd.

From her fellow employees, she got grief and harassment, but also camaraderie and love-and a distinct subway lingo that permeates her prose. At all hours of the day and night, New Yorkers in their glorious diversity rode her subway cars. Some spat on her and assaulted her; others were supportive and cheered her on. A white woman in a mostly minority male workplace, Swerdlow helped edit a rank-and-file newsletter, "Hell on Wheels", and tried to organize for better working conditions, confronting the Kafkaesque Transit Authority bureaucracy and complacent union leadership.

This book is full of the experiences that give New York City its edge-the rush hour, crime, medical emergencies, fires in subway cars, floods in subway tunnels, and confrontation of ethnic groups. The conductor is the person who hears what New Yorkers have to say about the quality of life in the Big Apple. And Swerdlow is a narrator with attitude, who has her own words for the subway system of today, including the new standards of politeness that riders are supposed to observe. Includes a glossary of over 140 subway terms.

Kirkus Reviews

The subway conductor—the man or woman, in a tiny compartment in the train's middle car, whose head emerges when the train stops in a station—is the one who bear the brunt of harried commuters' dissatisfaction with the vagaries of New York City's transit system. ("Conductors don't like sticking their heads out," Swerdlow tells us, "because they get deliberately hit by people on the platform.") This unusual glimpse of the other side of life on the tracks reveals how things look from the conductor's point of view. In 1982, Swerdlow, then a graduate student in sociology, became one of the city's first female conductors. This personal account has both humor and drama. She faced shootings and stabbings on her train and sexual harassment from male riders, tells of track fires and signal problems and the lack of women's toilets, underground romance with a fellow conductor and his variegated past, work rules and union organizing. Reading this, straphangers will gain a little compassion for subway conductors—and maybe stop whacking them on the head.

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