When the Motorman Mayor Met the Cable Car Ladies

Abstract

Gender played an important role in framing arguments for and against modernizing San Francisco’s transit system by replacing cable cars with motor coaches. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, appeals for public support from cable car preservationists and advocates of buses were saturated with gendered representations of the vehicles themselves, their intended ridership, and the areas of the city that they served. To counteract male-dominated discourses about transit progress, which stressed the benefits of greater efficiency and cost savings, a coalition of women’s civic organizations emphasized a romantic attachment to the city’s past and promoted the cable cars as a centerpiece of the city’s tourism economy. The “cable car war” demonstrates how the cultural politics of transit modernization in postwar San Francisco was refracted through competing visions of the gender of modernity.