Women with Muscle: Contemporary Women and the Classic Muscle Car

Introduction

Every summer weekend in Southeastern Michigan hundreds of aging babyboomer auto aficionados congregate at car shows, cruise-ins, swap meets, and a myriad of other classic car events. While such activities have been traditionally considered male pastimes, they have recently experienced an exponential growth in women’s participation. Of particular note is the upsurge of women in attendance who own and drive classic American muscle cars. While gender prescriptions limited young women’s participation in teenage muscle car culture during the 1960s and 1970s, it is not uncommon today to find divorced middle-aged moms and gray-haired grandmothers gunning the thunderous engines of classic Pontiac GTOS, Dodge Challengers, and Plymouth Roadrunners.¹ The original American muscle car—a two-door, rear-wheel-drive, midsize vehicle equipped with a large, muscular v8 engine and sold at an affordable price—was produced between 1962 and 1973 to appeal specifically to an affluent young male market. While much has been written about the American muscle car, in scholarship as well as in popular culture, the focus is primarily on its function as a source of masculine identity formation in the young male driver. Young women, if present in the literature, appear only on the margins as passengers and “avid spectators.”² However, as the increased presence of “mature” women at classic car events suggest, women not only have a renewed interest in the classic muscle car but have called upon muscle car ownership to construct a role for themselves in American car culture. Boomer and post-boomer women with a passion for power and speed have reclaimed the iconic symbol of American youth and masculinity and invested it with alternative meanings. Writing about women’s early automotive experiences, historian Georgine Clarsen asserts, “Women’s active engagements with automobiles were not simply paper copies of men’s, but were constitutive of [End Page 83 ] notions of what a car is and how it might be used, and of the social meanings and bodily experiences of femininity.”³ Considering Clarsen’s assertion as a call to action, this project seeks to contribute to the existing literature through an examination of the relationship between a particular group of women and the classic American muscle car.

In his 1983 review of the critical automotive literature American studies scholar Charles Sanford remarked, “women are conspicuously absent where they should be most present.”⁴ In the thirty years since Sanford’s astute observation there has been a small but significant incorporation of the woman driver into automotive scholarship. Historians Virginia Scharff, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, and Margaret Walsh have, over the past few decades, recuperated the woman driver from the masculine repositories of automotive history.⁵ Literary scholars Deborah Clarke, Marie Farr, and Cynthia Dettelbach and film scholars Katie Mills and Deborah Pas de Barros have called upon representations of the woman driver in contemporary women’s literature and film to demonstrate the significance of the automobile to women’s lives in a series of geographical, personal, and spiritual locations.⁶ Essays, short stories, and poetry that uncover women’s varied and complex relationships to the automobile, penned by distinguished female authors including Jayne Ann Phillips, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, have been gathered into eclectic collections for academic and popular culture libraries.⁷ Autoethnography has provided an opportunity for female journalists and racing enthusiasts—such as Lesley Hazelton and Denise McCluggage—to reflect upon their own automotive experiences.⁸ And social historians Kathleen Franz and Georgine Clarsen, as well as American studies scholar Cotten Seiler, have, through their attention to women’s reconfiguration of masculine machines, provided important insight into women’s active engagements with technologies generally considered male.⁹

While the existing scholarship provides a number of avenues in which to consider the woman driver, there is a discernible absence of real women’s voices. This project attempts to remedy that lack through attention to a particular population of women drivers: white, Christian, middle-class, heterosexual women of the boomer and post-boomer generations who own and drive classic American muscle cars. It seeks to understand how this group of women ascribes...