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Sister of The Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha - as told to Dr. Ben Reitman

by Ben L. Reitman , Barry Pateman (Afterword)

3.71 of 5 stars 3.71 · rating details · 245 ratings · 27 reviews

Another raging slab of real American history you're not likely to find in the textbooks. This is second title in the new (and best-selling!) Nabat series that debuted with Jack Black's You Can't Win . It's a window into a wildly under-appreciated dropout culture that gets left out of the stultifying fairytales that pass for history books—a much more rowdy and messily intere Another raging slab of real American history you're not likely to find in the textbooks. This is second title in the new (and best-selling!) Nabat series that debuted with Jack Black's You Can't Win . It's a window into a wildly under-appreciated dropout culture that gets left out of the stultifying fairytales that pass for history books—a much more rowdy and messily interesting tradition than the guardians of propriety, steeped in those other great American traditions of puritanism and hypocrisy, let on. Hobo jungles, bughouses, whorehouses, Chicago's Main Stem, IWW meeting halls, skid rows and open freight cars—these were the haunts of the free thinking and free loving Bertha Thompson. This vivid autobiography recounts one hell of a rugged woman's hard-living depression-era saga of misadventures with pimps, hopheads, murderers, yeggs, wobblies and anarchists.

"...her narrative is cauliflower-eared by the brutal truth."— Time

"Thompson's capacity for taking pleasure in her experiences is as striking as the enormous range of her sympathy."—Luc Santé, New York Review Of Books

Dr. Ben Reitman (1880–1942)—hobo, whorehouse physician, anarchist agitator, and tour manager/lover of Emma Goldman, was a mighty interesting character in his own right.

This edition has a new afterword by Barry Pateman, curator of UC Berkeley's Emma Goldman Papers, which contains information on the background of the book, and of author Dr. Ben Reitman.

Nabat books is a series dedicated to reprinting forgotten memoirs by various misfits, outsiders, and rebels. We believe that the truly interesting and meaningful lives are only to be had by dropouts, dissidents, renegades and revolutionaries, against the grain and between the cracks. The Nabat Series offers a little something to set against the crushed hopes, banal lives, and commodification of everything.

Also in the Nabat Series:

You Can't Win by Jack Black
TP $16.00, 1-902593-02-2 o CUSA ...more

Paperback , 208 pages

Published May 1st 2002 by AK Press (first published 1937)

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Oct 05, 2014 S. Miles Lotman rated it 3 of 5 stars

No doubt the most famous book on American wanderlust was written by Jack Kerouac, who might have had a case of dromomania, that is, a psychological need to wander without real purpose or intention, as in (utilizing the lexicon of the times) “just for kicks.” America has always been a huge land, seemingly endless, and there is nothing more American than reinventing oneself in a new town, either legally or dubiously, and starting over. Dromomania is embedded in American DNA, striking the odd nativ
No doubt the most famous book on American wanderlust was written by Jack Kerouac, who might have had a case of dromomania, that is, a psychological need to wander without real purpose or intention, as in (utilizing the lexicon of the times) “just for kicks.” America has always been a huge land, seemingly endless, and there is nothing more American than reinventing oneself in a new town, either legally or dubiously, and starting over. Dromomania is embedded in American DNA, striking the odd native child and setting him or her on a journey-- all Kerouac did was place our cultural pastime in a mythical, romantic context accessible to any sort of dreamer, the young, the penniless, the damned.

Little known today, Boxcar Bertha is the autobiography of one Bertha Thompson, her life story as told to and recorded by Dr. Ben Reitman. Bertha is a plainspoken narrator with immense curiosity, a terrific sense of adventure, and deep roots in the social justice moments in the first half of the 20th century, involving herself mostly in women's issues and the labor movement. She criss-crossed the country, a la Kerouac, but instead of riding shotgun with a madcap pill-popping drag-racing pothead, did most of her traveling hopping freight cars, sometimes alone, often partnered up with a social agitator beau, or conspiring among other “sisters of the road.” (Last night I watched the Martin Scorsese adaptation of her life's testimony, Boxcar Bertha, from 1972 and starring Barbara Hershey as Bertha-- I was shocked at the fictional liberties the filmmakers pursued, basically ripping off Bonnie and Clyde, turning Bertha into a hayseed moll in a bankrobbing Depression-era gang, ignoring the progressive do-right spirit that marks Bertha as a genuinely selfless champion of workers' and especially women's rights.)

This was in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of labor “agitation,” when workers often martyred themselves against police and a punitive justice system so that future generations might have better contractual rights, fairer pay, insurance benefits, and a decent pension. Bertha participated in these movements firsthand, but her real gift was her engaging, disarming personality, and either with a steeltrap memory or assiduous notetaking, became a reservoir of anecdotal biographies of wandering women from all kinds of socio-economic backgrounds. The odd (or dangerous) jobs aside, Bertha worked with researchers, incorporating her firsthand knowledge of the hardships of the road and her encounters there, compiling them into an account of anthropological provenance-- a 35-page appendix presents Bertha's findings on the sociological factors inspiring women to live nomadically, among them the specific differentiation between “hoboes” and “bums” (the former looking for work, the latter all-around ne'er-do-wells).

There is no shortage of characters coming into Bertha's life on her travels-- hopheads, murderers, anarchists, lunatics, punks, and wobblies. She wanders from rustic communes to firebrand union halls, runs with a Midwestern gang of thieves and parties with lesbians, poets, and “spittoon philosophers” in Greenwich Village. In New York City she encounters her father, a middle-aged philanderer running an unsuccessful radical bookshop. It is her first time meeting this wayward man, whom she chastises for failing to take on his parental duties. Defending himself, he identifies two different kinds of men, “'the uterine type'... the good father, home lover, monogamist” and the “phallic type” who “needs women. Any women would do.” He goes on: “there are no solutions to the problems of life. There are no goals. You just go on living and loving and doing the best or the worst you can.”

As much as Baby Boomers like to take credit for the sixties-era sexual revolution, all they'd really done is enjoy mainstream social acceptance of a promiscuous lifestyle. And though Bertha enjoyed numerous partners in “free love” hook-ups, she'd learned early on from her mother that the human body was not a vehicle for sin, but an instrument of pleasure, sharing, in fact, sexual liaisons with men who'd loved her mother. But it is one thing to have an open attitude towards sex, a whole other to be pimped out to “Johns,” which is something Bertha does in order to better understand this underground lifestyle. In a Chicago whorehouse, she turns forty tricks a day, seven days a week, sleeping with several thousand men in six weeks. Nearly all her money is confiscated by her “man,” she contracts syphilis and gonorrhea as well as becomes pregnant! She bears this child of an unknowable father, and her wayfaring instinct stronger than her maternal one, she makes the same choice of freedom over duty that her father had, dropping off her newborn daughter with her mother in a Seattle commune and hitting the road: “There's something constantly itching in my soul that only the road and the box cars can satisfy. Jobs, lovers, a child-- don't seem to be able to curb my wanderlust.” The road is a long one, but eventually for nearly all of us, it has a destination, even for a vagabond as mobile as Boxcar Bertha. But that tired platitude about the journey is true: it really does matter how you get there, and it was the lives of women like Bertha Thompson's that, cumulatively, have made the world a better, freer, more compassionate place. ...more

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Jul 23, 2008 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars

The female "You Can't Win," sort of. Belongs on the top shelf of your Hobo Studies collection, or at least of mine.

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Aug 12, 2009 D'artagnan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Generations cycle through, cry through endless nights then molder in graves cold, but the habits & desires of society and individuals abide. So modern to believe we live like none before us, but the the things that don't change prove most uncanny & ubiquitous. I love Bertha for her honesty, I love hitchhiking, wide open spaces and concrete jungles. Found out that there's a movie loosely based on the book that came out in 1972 (two stars). One disappointing thing, however, was finding out ...more

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Apr 04, 2013 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction , historical-fiction

(review originally written for bookslut)

I am one of those people who always wants to know whether a movie, book, or story is true. It's not so much that I think true stories are somehow better than fiction, but that I appreciate them differently. For instance, I adore the novel Jane Eyre and am not in the least bit disturbed that there is no way it could be a true story, yet the movie Erin Brockovich would not be nearly so charming if it were not true. That said, when I picked up Sister of the R (review originally written for bookslut)

I am one of those people who always wants to know whether a movie, book, or story is true. It's not so much that I think true stories are somehow better than fiction, but that I appreciate them differently. For instance, I adore the novel Jane Eyre and am not in the least bit disturbed that there is no way it could be a true story, yet the movie Erin Brockovich would not be nearly so charming if it were not true. That said, when I picked up Sister of the Road - The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha in the bookstore, I knew I had to read it. Described as the autobiography of a hobo "free-thinking and free-loving" woman in the early twentieth century, it sounded radical and inspiring. And the book was radical and inspiring, right up until the afterward, where it was confessed that Sister of the Road was not, in fact, an autobiography, but rather a work of fiction. Let's just say that I was very annoyed.

I still think that Sister of the Road is an interesting story and one worth reading. However, I would be much more interesting in reading the life story of the man who wrote it. Dr. Ben Reitman was a hobo, a writer, a doctor, an agitator, an educator, a lover of Emma Goldman and a distributor of birth control information at a time when such doing so was illegal and highly dangerous. Now that would be an interesting story.

But back to the book at hand. Once I recovered from my peevishness at being duped, I realized that Sister of the Road really did not lose much for not being literally true. After all, Reitman based this book largely on three women that he knew, as well as material from hundreds of conversations he had with various tramps, hoboes, and other people on the road throughout the course of his life. It remains a provocative glimpse into a way of life and an entire culture that most people were never aware existed.

Boxcar Bertha grew up in communes, railway yards, and in hobo hotels that her mother, who both practiced and preached free-love, operated. Her education was primarily one of speaking with vagrants, socialist, and activists of all kinds. By the time she was sixteen, she was criss-crossing the country on trains, mostly by hoboing, very rarely paying her way, even when she had the money. She loved and left men, fell into a life of crime and then walked away, she spent time in a prison, a venereal disease hospital, a brothel, and working in an abortion clinic. There are very few aspects of underground life that she does not delve into.

The most amazing thing about Sister of the Road is that for the majority of the book, it remains uplifting even in the midst of what might what be taken to be very dark circumstances. The only times Bertha really gives over into depression is when someone she loves dies. The rest of the time she plows ahead with a matter of fact optimism, determined to make the best of everything. Determined to never think ill of her fellow wanderers, she seeks out the motivations of why people do the things that they do. Here is where the reader truly benefits from Dr. Reitman's hundreds of interviews, as he illuminates how people come to be the people they are, and why they believe what they profess to believe.

Conversely, perhaps the greatest weakness of this book is simply the amount of time that has passed since it was written. Trains are no longer as commonly used as a method of transportation as they once were, and when the book describes the various places a hobo could ride on a train, I only rarely could understand what they were talking about. These distinctions were often important, as certain ways of riding the train were much more dangerous than others, and it would have been nice to be able to picture them as I read.

Such minor complaints aside, Sister of the Road truly is an amazing novel. It is an autobiography not of a single woman, but of thousands of men and women who dropped out of the dominant culture to live life on different terms. These are lives and stories rarely told in history texts, and that's exactly what makes this book so valuable. ...more

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Sep 21, 2008 Joshua rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction , fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 15, 2009 Ocean rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

this is the story of a freewheeling anarchist lady hobo who travels the country in the 1920's and 30's, hanging out with all sorts of radicals and getting into all sorts of adventures. this book was really interesting and easy-to-read, although i suspect it's actually fiction by ben reitman & not an autobiography. it was really inspiring & fun. i would have given it four stars but i was turned off by all the homophobia! every other group of weirdoes is treated with love except for the ga ...more

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Oct 27, 2014 M.h. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-for-uni , read-in-2014 , travelogue

3,5

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Jan 02, 2008 blue-collar mind rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: hobos, gutter punks, wobblies, feminists, anarchist anthropologists

Shelves: checked-out-from-iron-rail-collect

Although clearly written from a man's point of view, it is still a frank, revealing view of free women who rode the rails and campaigned either overtly or through their choices for a less repressive society.
It should be assigned to every girl at the age of 12; those girls would remember the good and the bad written here (even without the editorial slant that Dr. Reitman feels he must add) and make different choices as a result, and really, what more can a book do for you than that?

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Apr 20, 2007 karly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: travellers

This book is a good read. it tells the combined story of multiple different women hobos during the early part of the last century. the stories contained in the book are informational beyond just being a good story. the subjects they mention, such as the hobo camps or the hobo colleges or the specific apartments or tenements, are part of a much larger hobo history of the time. It's also part of a series being published by AK Press with lots of other really good books in it.

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Dec 26, 2007 Bryan rated it 3 of 5 stars

NABAT finally makes it clear that his book is a work of fiction - based on true stories as told to or experienced by Dr Reitman. I read this book while researching my own book regarding my great-aunt who was a female hobo for 15 months in 1925. "Boxcar Bertha" is set in the 1930s. Her "experience" is dramatically different from that of my great-aunt but none-the-less interesting. I beleive this book would appeal more to the student of sociology than an historian.

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Aug 07, 2007 Ivy Jeanne rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: everyone

This book was such an inspiration to me. It is still one of my favorites. Although it was purported to be one woman named Boxcar Bertha,it is an amalgamation of many strong, radical women that Dr. Ben Reitman, the radical doctor of prostitutes, met over many years in the early 20th century. It is the story of hobos, prostitutes, labor organizers, and con artists doing what they could to survive in America.

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Jul 02, 2010 Bullet rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: feminist

Even though I expected Boxcar Bertha to be more of a badass, I admire that she took it upon herself to experience as much as possible for the sake of learning about the human condition. She has pretty much seen it all, even if she hasn't done it. This book was a rare education about Depression-era America with stories and statistics that weren't typically recorded out of "decency".

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Oct 08, 2007 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Awesome historical read of women hoboes during the Great Depression. A great alternative radical history, full of free loving, free-wheeling, free-thinking Wobblies and activists of all stripes whose connection to each other was the rails and a non-mainstream way of being. Found this book quite inspirational, like Angela Davis' auto-biography.

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Aug 23, 2008 Pamela rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book was pretty good. It was a little repetitious, but overall interesting. It gives a good idea of what it is like to be a female traveling around the country as a hobo, train-hopper, or as the title states sister of the road.

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Jan 26, 2009 Saara added it

i was very excited about reading a book about the experiences of a female hobo... until i found out it is fiction, written by a male writer. but still it was interesting, badly written though.

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Jun 21, 2011 Shenanitims rated it 2 of 5 stars

The postscript at the end kind of ruined the book for me. I might've been more receptive had I known what the book actually was going into it, instead of coming out of it.

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Feb 03, 2008 jack added it

Shelves: bio-memoir

another classic hobo bio. bertha however is much more than a rail rider. she gets mixed up with the trouble stirring emma G! read more and find out.

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May 01, 2011 Sarah Sammis rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: pc , read-in-1997

May or may not be true but it's still a damn fine page turner. This book was another of my late night reads at the laundromat.

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Feb 25, 2008 Jakey rated it 4 of 5 stars

A really good read, although obviously cobbled together from the histories of various anarchist women.

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Jun 19, 2007 Lady rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommends it for: orenge

Shelves: bios-memoirs

a unique and true story. an effortless read for a nice spring open road.

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Apr 25, 2007 Anna rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography , roots-radicals , this-shit-blew-my-mind

Um, this book made me really want to be a hobo for about a week.

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Jun 25, 2013 Melody rated it 2 of 5 stars

Good for the project I'm working on. Otherwise I had some issues.

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May 09, 2012 Q rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-for-class , indie-pub

I have nothing intelligent to say about this book.

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Apr 30, 2009 Flo is currently reading it · review of another edition

so far just the introduction but DAY-UMM. so good.

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Jul 27, 2008 Jen Treadway rated it 5 of 5 stars

Really and truly fascinating

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Sep 01, 2014 Diana rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a very fun read. As I understand it, it was sold as a memoir, but later revealed to be fiction. That controversy doesn't diminish the story. Published in 1937, it's very readable, and filled with authentic details. My copy (from 1937) has an appendix with statistics and anecdotal information about homelessness and "radicals" in the 1930s.

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Jun 04, 2012 Heidi rated it 5 of 5 stars

A lifelong favorite

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