Foreword
With the breakthrough in women's rights in the past few years, women have found employment in more and more lines of work formerly available only to men. This is true not only in the professions such as law and medicine, but it has also occurred in various skilled and unskilled jobs, many once considered too difficult or hazardous for a woman to handle. Among those in this category are various jobs in municipal transportation, such as bus drivers and in Chicago and New York, elevated operators, jobs that were once considered both too difficult and too dangerous for women.
However, in recent years a number of female bus drivers and elevated (or el) operators have been hired in various municipalities. For the most part, they have proved entirely competent to handle these jobs. However, there is a definite risk involved where females handle such jobs. Many bus runs and elevated runs occur late at night and go through, or terminate at, remote and relatively unprotected areas of the city. Thus, female transportation operators are often placed in situations where they do not have adequate police protection, and are therefore susceptible to rape and other deviate assaults by the degenerates of the community.
In this book, author William St. Cyr has written a thoughtful, insightful analysis of this growing urban problem. Although the names and the locale have been changed, the story is based upon an actual incident. The heroine of the story is Carolyn Compton, a young woman in her late twenties who goes to court to challenge her city's restrictions against female elevated operators. She wins, takes the necessary training and becomes the city's first female el operator.
If Carolyn had been born a male, the story would end there. However, she is young and attractive, and the public nature of the job she holds advertises her female charms to everyone, including the degenerates that every large metropolitan area harbors. Carolyn becomes the victim, first of one of her passengers, and then of a bizarre kidnapping scheme where her captors hope to cash in on the publicity resulting from her lawsuit against the city.
As Carolyn undergoes her ordeal, Mr. St. Cyr deftly sketches in the personality changes that occur as the captors subject her to various degradations, and we see her will break under the strain. The story has many other parallels, such as the prisoner-of-war syndrome and the Hearst kidnapping. For this reason we believe that Mr. St. Cyr's book is not only significant but timely, and will provide the reader with much food for thought.
For these reasons, we highly recommend this book to our readers, who will find it not only entertaining but informative.
-THE PUBLISHERS