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| Maude Foley - Nova Scotia Archives |
"It seems strange to see girls running the elevators and acting as trolley car conductors. I saw a girl walking on the outside of a car and fixing the pole just like a man. What are we coming to anyway?"- by Carl Moulton of Connecticut in a letter to his girlfriend on January 23, 1918 while in Halifax waiting to go overseas.*102 years ago today. for the first time, women were employed as trolley car conductors for the Nova Scotia Tramways and Power Company. Maud Foley, the woman in the picture above, was among the first hired according to the Nova Scotia Archives.
It was nearing the end of WWI and just weeks before, sections of Halifax and Dartmouth were destroyed after a collision between a fully loaded munitions ship and a cargo ship - the Halifax Explosion. Nine men working for Nova Scotia Tramways and Power Company died as a result of the blast. For the conductors who survived, many didn’t come back to work due to family circumstances or because they were helping out with the reconstruction effort. This meant there was a shortage of drivers for the electric trolley cars. Management discussed the possibility of women filling these positions and then realized it could work.
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| Trolley - Expo Rail |
In the early 1900s woman were making considerably less money than men. Some woman in my family were making only $5 a week. The new women conductors pay was 45 cents an hour. If they worked a 40-hour week they’d make $18 a week. The joy of their sudden sense of value and their new found affluence would be short lived since, once the men returned from war many women would lose their jobs to them.
“On December 31 (1917) eight women conductors were in charge of cars, and a number of others were in training. The experience, so far, is that the services of women conductors are practically as efficient as those of men, and it is the intention to utilize women’s services for this purpose to the fullest extent possible.”**
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* Maud Foley, street car conductor in Halifax, ca. 191; Nova Scotia Archives 199900096
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nsarchives/39513377794
** Report: "The Nova Scotia Tramways and Power Company and the Halifax Explosion". — 2 pages : 26 x 35 cm. Archibald MacMechan; (year added to quote); https://novascotia.ca/archives/macmechan/archives.asp?ID=11
