Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America

1. Women on Wheels: "A threat at yesterday's order of things"

Women on Wheels “A threat at yesterday’s order of things” “Every time a woman learns to drive—and thousands do every year—it is a threat at yesterday’s order of things,” wrote Ray W. Sherman in a 1927 issue of Motor (qtd. in Scharff 117). Given the influence of the automobile on twentieth-century America, it would seem that the presence of the car itself constituted a serious threat to “yesterday ’s order of things.” But Sherman’s statement makes a vitally important point: it is not simply the car that has transformed American culture; women’s access to it has likewise constituted a revolutionary force for change. When women moved behind the wheel, a new era began. The car, as a powerful machine, may have been initially perceived as the province of men, but women were quick to claim its potential. They greeted the car enthusiastically, even sacrificing various household goods to obtain one. In 1919 a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector questioned a woman about why her family had purchased a car when they didn’t own a bathtub. She immediately responded, “Why, you can’t go to town in a bathtub” (qtd. in Reck 8). Automobility is prized over cleanliness—and even over such basics as food and clothing, according to the Lynds’ “Middletown” study in the 1920s. “We’d rather do without clothes than give up the car,” said one mother. Another woman asserted, “I’ll go without food before I’ll see us give up the car” (Middletown 255, 256). This determination indeed represented a threat to yesterday’s order of things—and today’s. From its beginnings the automobile has challenged assumptions about the role of domesticity, female responsibility, and even women’s identity. The development of the motor car affected women across the country, helping to break down boundaries between urban and rural life, opening up possibilities to get out of the house and, in so doing, also destabilizing established categories of class and gender. No longer relegated to the home, women now drove into the public sphere, exercising control over the latest technology. Christie McGaffey Frederick remarked in a 1912 Suburban Life article: “Learning to handle the car has wrought my emancic h a p t e r o n e pation, my freedom, I am no longer a country-bound farmer’s wife; I am no longer dependent on tiresome trains, slow-buggies, the ‘old mare,’ or the almanac. The auto is the link which binds the metropolis to my pastoral existence; which brings me into frequent touch with the entertainment and life of my neighboring small towns—with the joys of bargains, library and soda-water” (qtd. in Berger, “Women Drivers” 57). And once they’ve tasted soda water, there’s no keeping them down on the farm. For women the car provided access to a wider range of possibilities, erasing isolation and changing identity: “I am no longer a country-bound farmer’s wife.” But this is precisely the problem: once a woman becomes a driver, can she still be a wife, or even a woman? With women’s growing access not only to technological power but also to mobility , new concerns about the stability of the family and the social order surfaced. What happens to domesticity when women are out on the road? Further, what happens to women when they take the wheel? Sidonie Smith argues that “women used automobiles as vehicles of resistance to conventional gender roles and the strictures of a normative femininity” (175), but access to the automobile had a wide range of repercussions for women, both positive and negative.We see a celebration of the new technology and grave concerns about its impact on women’s lives and women’s power, concerns shared by both men and women, though women certainly have a much less contested vision of what the car has to offer them. The automobile, brimming with contradictory symbolism, is an excellent vehicle through which to explore women’s place in early-twentieth-century American culture and literature. Looking at popular consumer culture and literature and their relation to the car illuminates women’s complex position in an increasingly technological age. From authors of popular girls’ books to Edith Wharton, women wrote their way into automotive culture. Wharton, an extremely astute automotive observer, fully recognized both the possibilities and the liabilities inherent in the power of automobility. Perhaps more than any other available consumer...