This book had an interesting topic and a lot of potential.  The pictures were good additions but unfortunately, the book is a difficult read. The content consists of mostly verbatim quotes and little to no analysis, independent thought, or conclusions.  Not sure I've ever read a book before where every single paragraph had at least one footnote.  I would not recommend this book to others.

Iron Women examines women who contributed to the rise of the railroads. The chapters cover inventors, writers, bosses, and the infamous Harvey Girls. Women played an integral part in making the railroads a significant factor in US history. The chapter I find the most interesting was the one on the HArvey Girls. I had a vague idea who they were, but I had no idea it was a chain of restaurants and hotels along the southwest that gave jobs to thousands of women from the 1890s-1930s.

In IRON WOMEN, Chris Enss focuses on women’s contributions to the railroads during the 1800s and early 1900s. Men might have physically built the railroads, but women made lasting contributions and helped inspire travel. Enss covers female telegraphers, the Harvey Girls, and women who created the refrigerated boxcars, designed more comfortable passenger cars, promoted westward travel through artwork or written pieces, and an architect who built some of the Harvey Houses and the tourist sites at the Grand Canyon. Some of the women Enss focused on were a bit out in left field—including famous train robber Laura Bullion, a prostitute who was murdered and later had a train car named after her, and Lily Langtry who had a specially made train car for her travels throughout the United States. 

While an interesting read, I didn’t feel as if the book really had much focus on the railroad. 

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This just wasn't for me.. I got about a chapter in and couldn't take any more. The writing was just... bad. Some of the sentence structures made me wonder if I was reading a high school paper. Short incomplete mini-biographies were thrown in as if it made perfect sense to do so - and the questions those left unanswered were far more interesting than what I was being told! It may simply be that as someone who prefers the deep dive academic history stuff to this pop history distillation I just wasn't the target market for this.