The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City

2. “Nobody but a Bunch of Mothers”: Fighting the Highwaymen during Feminism’s Second Wave

53 She towers over the city below, clutching a car in her hand. Her miniskirt and bikini top reveal long sturdy legs and heaving breasts. Traffic has come to a halt as people flee their cars in terror. The police cannot stop the destructive march of this buxom giant, who visits her feminine wrath on the city. It’s the Fifty-Foot Woman, and the freeway between her legs is about to topple (Figure 2.1). A 1958 B movie, The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman tells the story of an abused woman who grows to giant size through an alien encounter and gets even with her philandering husband. The movie belongs to a category of 1950s science fiction films that made the city its mise-en-scène. The urban science fiction film rendered a spectacular portrait of urban destruction, deploying innovative visual effects to dramatize the fall of civilization. And by 1958, at the very moment of their debut on the urban scene, freeways fit squarely within the iconography of the urban science fiction film, a concrete symbol of progress in its latest incarnation. And though it was built to last, this freeway met a quick demise at the hands of an angry woman.1 The image suggests an undercurrent of anxiety about women and their threat to the man-made icons of progress, at least in the galaxy of 1950s American popular culture. Yet, as with the many social fantasies and anxieties encoded within movies, TV programs, and radio hits, this image struck a chord of authenticity in the political culture of the 1960s. With the onset of the freeway revolt, diverse women in cities throughout the nation expressed their ambition to pulverize freeways and the plans for their construction. Fighting the Highwaymen during Feminism’s Second Wave “Nobody but a Bunch of Mothers” 2 FIGURE 2.1. Attack of the 50-ft. Woman, promotional poster, 1958. “Nobody but a Bunch of Mothers” 55 They took leading roles in organizing opposition to urban highway construction and asserted a gendered critique of that work through creative forms of cultural expression. Their disparate efforts illuminate a gendered discrepancy between the cadre of male planners and engineers who built freeways, the “fraternity” that Jane Jacobs chided in Death and Life, and the women who challenged their efforts in order to defend the spaces of family, neighborhood, and community. Though men and women of diverse neighborhoods united in opposition to highway construction, there are gendered expressions of this conflict that resonated throughout the political culture of the 1960s. Amid the surge of feminism’s so-called second wave, women stepped outside the boxes of 1950s stereotypes to openly question the premises of urban highway construction, casting doubt on the benefit of freeways to “mankind”—a popular term in the civic discourse of postwar America.2 The dominant narrative of the freeway revolt slights the intellectual and organizational leadership of white women, but it altogether ignores the voices of women of color, who mustered their own version of the freeway revolt through creative forms of cultural expression, even after freeways had decimated their communities. This chapter is thus a tale of two struggles: of white metropolitan women—mothers, homeowners, and shrewd organizers—who assumed leading roles in their communities’ fight against highway construction , and of working-class women of color, who summoned artistic talent and creative imagination to assert an indictment of highway construction as both a sexist and a racist enterprise. Their divergent experiences with highway construction illustrate racial and class disparities in the fight against the freeway, but the combined force of their efforts sheds light on the gendered dimensions of the freeway revolt and its diverse expressions in American culture. Freeways and the Suburban Mystique In Alison Lurie’s 1965 novel, The Nowhere City, Paul Cattleman, recently graduated from Harvard with a history PhD, and his wife, Katherine, leave the cozy comforts of Cambridge so he can work as company historian for the Nutting Research and Development Corporation, an electronics firm located in West Los Angeles. The newlywed couple rent a stucco bungalow in Mar 56 “Nobody but a Bunch of Mothers” Vista, a tract-housing community built for aircraft workers during the late 1940s. As Paul begins to discover the pleasures of Los Angeles, which include a furtive dalliance with a beatnik waitress in Venice Beach, Katherine frets at home, bedridden from allergies in Southern...