Born to drive: Elderly women’s recollections of early automotive experiences

Abstract

It is estimated that in the years leading up to the Second World War, less than one quarter of USA women held driver’s licenses. Due to the absence of data on women’s automotive participation prior to 1963, what is known about the female motorist of this era is limited. While feminist historians have painstakingly recovered the woman driver through traditional research methods, there remains an absence of first-hand accounts of women’s automobile experience. This paper calls upon the narratives of 21 elderly women to provide new insight into women’s automotive history. These rich oral histories not only fill in the gaps about what is known about women and cars, but examined through the lens of Portelli’s “living voices”, reveal how automotive experiences affected women’s lives in the past, and how the meaning of those experiences has been remembered and reconstructed over time.

From 100-Year-Old Women’s Motoring Masks to Contemporary PPE: A Socio-Political Study of Persistent Problems and Inventive Possibilities

“…Further research was undertaken in newspaper and periodical archives to thicken contextual understandings and deepen emerging ideas. This combination is critical for studying women's motoring experiences prior to 1963 due to the rarity of first-hand oral accounts (Lezotte, 2019). Much like cyclists, women motorists were more often written about than writing themselves.…”

Pink power: The Barbie car and female automobility

“…As Parkin asserts, "any attempts to develop automotive acumen […] challenged cultural definitions of women's gender and sexual identity" (2017, xvi). As noted in projects focused on female participation in masculine car cultures (Lezotte 2012(Lezotte , 2013b(Lezotte , 2019bLumsden 2010), women who demonstrate an interest in pickup trucks, muscle cars, or off-road vehicles are often subject to questions about their sexuality and are disparaged as unfeminine, aberrant, or freakish. Mattel successfully diminishes this association in a variety of ways, but most prominently through the use of color.…”

What Would Miss Daisy Drive? The Road Trip Film, the Automobile, and the Woman Behind the Wheel

“…Women were rarely considered potential customers for convertibles; the car was considered too fast, unsafe, and ostentatious for the female motorist. Yet, as I discovered when in conversations with twenty‐one elderly women about their early automotive experiences, “while only a few had actually owned them, almost all of the women had—at some point in time—yearned for a flashy ragtop” (Lezotte, “Elderly” 406). Although most eventually settled for a functional family vehicle, the women could not help but imagine the convertible as the means to a pleasurable and exciting escape from the practicality and monotony of their daily existence.…”