On October 12, 1918, the suffragist magazine The Woman Citizen published a photo essay documenting women working in the Union Pacific Railroad shops in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Captured during American mobilization for World War I, the images showed women performing industrial labor—operating machinery and handling materials—to help sustain railroad operations while many men were serving in the armed forces.
The feature reflected a significant wartime shift: as labor shortages intensified, women across Wyoming and the nation took on jobs previously closed or less accessible to them. In Cheyenne, women’s work in the Union Pacific shops offered a visible example of women contributing directly to industrial production and railroad logistics during a national emergency.
For The Woman Citizen, such images also carried political meaning. As the official publication of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the magazine used women’s wartime service and economic contribution to strengthen the case for political equality. While women’s wartime labor was only one part of a much longer suffrage campaign, it gave suffragists a powerful contemporary argument for the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920.
