Abstract
If you own a car, you will never think about your relationship with it the same way again after reading Katherine J. Parkin’s Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving, and Fixing Cars. Parkin’s study shines a light on the tasks that so many of us take for granted—getting a driver’s license, shopping for and purchasing a car, taking it in to get serviced—and reveals how different those experiences were (and are) for men and women. As the title suggests, Parkin’s main interest in this study is on American women’s relationships with cars. She shows that buying, driving, and fixing cars were complicated undertakings for women. On the one hand, cars offered women independence and autonomy. But such opportunities always had their limits. Overwhelmingly, Parkin argues, cars and car culture helped to entrench traditional gender ideologies and patriarchal assumptions. Whether they were suburban mothers fulfilling their domestic responsibilities, passengers who had to keep quiet lest they be labeled backseat drivers, or as sex symbols starring in advertisements meant for the heterosexual male gaze—to name just a few of the stereotypes that Parkin explores—women’s relationship with cars principally served to “affirm their gender identity” (p. x).
Parkin’s study is organized thematically, with chapters on “Learning to Drive,” “Buying a Car,” “Driving a Car,” “Caring for a Car,” and “The Car and Identity.” Each of these chapters dips into more than one hundred years of popular culture, with a heavy focus on magazine and television advertisements. Parkin also makes use of archival materials from sources as varied as driver education programs, travel guides, fiction and poetry, and the collections of automobile companies. What emerges is a fascinating and thought-provoking portrait of the gendered world of cars and car culture, one designed primarily to keep women in their place. In the chapter “Learning to Drive,” for example, Parkin shows that driving instructors treated teenage boys as “novices,” while girls were assumed to be “incompetents” (p. 6), an assumption that would follow women drivers throughout their lives. Getting their driver’s license was another fraught site of gendered expectations, as women were subject to scrutiny about their weight, age, appearance, and religious expression. We learn, too, that in states like Florida, Texas, Alabama, and California, married women’s right to use their own names on their licenses often led to high-profile court cases.
When women entered into the world of car ownership, especially in the second half of the century when more of them had the financial means to do so, they were bombarded with advertisements that either equated their feelings about cars with domestic life—women were promised cars that were easy to clean, well-equipped, and dependable—or played into the stereotype that women were bad drivers and desired cars that were easy to maneuver and park. The cliché about women drivers also takes center stage in the chapters on driving and caring for cars, as Parkin navigates through decades of pop culture to show just how common it was for the “bad woman driver” to be the punchline of comedy routines, movies, and sitcoms. Women drivers were much more than just a source for jokes, however, as Parkin makes clear in her discussion about how being in a car was a vulnerable and even dangerous proposition for women. The reality was that women in cars were at risk of sexual assault, police harassment, and more. Parkin unpacks the way that the knowledge of such risks played out in everything from tire advertisements that promised not to leave women stranded on the side of the road to the introduction of illuminated entry systems in the 1980s to assuage the fears of women getting into their cars in dark parking garages. In the last chapter, she argues that American men, especially, used cars to “perform their gender” and establish their heterosexuality, and she highlights the animating and anthropomorphizing that facilitated the “ability to blur the identities between women and cars” (p. 145).
We also hear throughout Women at the Wheel about the potential that cars offered to empower women. Economically vulnerable women could gain independence by learning to drive, for example, and housewives attained a measure of freedom from the “prisons” of their suburban homes when their family got a second car. Parkin spends the most time on the opportunities that cars afforded women in the chapter titled “Caring for a Car,” in which she has uncovered fascinating histories of women-only car maintenance classes and women- and lesbian-owned auto repair shops that began to emerge in the 1970s. Such examples will likely leave readers wanting to hear more about the ways that women pushed back against the patriarchal limits imposed on them. Throughout the book, we get tantalizing mentions of suffragists using cars for political organizing and businesswomen using their cars as “offices” for selling cosmetics and housewares, but Parkin does not elaborate much on these examples. While recognizing that Parkin’s focus is on cultural representations, one can’t help but wish the experiences and voices of women could be a bit more present in this study.
Women at the Wheel covers a long span of time, from the late nineteenth century to the present. This ambitious scope allows Parkin to trace compelling patterns between the past and the present; she can take us in the course of just one sentence from a 1925 newspaper article that blamed women drivers for traffic jams to twenty-first-century viral videos of women’s parking and driving disasters. Parkin’s engagement with such a wide range of popular culture, and the way she is able to craft this rich source base into compelling historical arguments, would make this an ideal book for an undergraduate course in women’s and gender history (to give just one example). I could envision using this study to prompt students to think about why certain gender ideologies persist and how they are adapted to changing social, cultural, and economic contexts.
Women at the Wheel is written in clear and engaging prose, and it is full of evocative images and stories that are both lighthearted and serious. The historical analysis contained in this often-entertaining read will, most importantly, leave you thinking carefully about the complicated relationship between the masculinist prescriptions of cars and women’s experiences behind the wheel.