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

Introduction

It could easily be argued that in twenty-first-century America, women have achieved driving equality. In the United States, women comprise over half of licensed drivers. ¹ It has been estimated that women buy 65 per cent of all new cars sold in the USA, and influence 85 per cent of car buying decisions. ² Women are featured in car advertising and their opinions are sought and valued in automotive surveys and focus groups. Women are members of car pools, car clubs, car forums, and have gained respect as savvy and knowledgeable automotive consumers. Women’s presence on American roadways is so ubiquitous, in fact, that it is hard to imagine a time when women weren’t behind the wheel. However, the woman driver is fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the Second World War, the female motorist was an exception rather than expectation. While there is an absence of statistics on women’s automotive participation before 1963, historian Margaret Walsh estimates that in the prewar era, only a quarter of women of legal driving age held driver’s licenses. ³ The reasons for women’s exclusion were both financial and cultural. Individual automobile ownership was beyond the monetary means of the average American woman. And in the years following the First World War, women were discouraged from driving over fear that automobility would result in newfound independence and a neglect of household and familial responsibilities. In an effort to keep women off the road, women drivers were negatively portrayed in popular culture and the press, thwarted in attempts to purchase cars in their own names, and prevented from taking driving lessons by controlling fathers and husbands. My own mother, born in 1919 to Polish immigrants, spent a lifetime in Detroit – the Motor City – without learning to drive. And she was hardly an anomaly. Many women of her generation were cast in the role of “motor wife”, dependent on husbands – as well as fathers, friends, and unreliable public transit – for shopping, doctor’s appointments, and other personal and household tasks. ⁴ The campaign against women’s driving during this era would suggest that only the most determined woman found the will and the means to secure a car and a license to operate it.

As Walsh suggests, what is known about female motorists prior to the Second World War is limited. While there is reference to women who operated vehicles during wartime – serving as ambulance drivers or in the military motor pool overseas, or taking over men’s driving occupations on the home front – the daily habits of the average female motorist are not well documented. ⁵ Feminist automotive historians – including Virginia Scharff, Kathleen Franz, and Georgine Clarsen – have pieced together a composite of the early female motorist through the recovery and examination of primary and secondary sources. ⁶ Walsh’s extensive research focuses primarily on women drivers of the postwar era. ⁷ Although these resources – car advertisements, newspaper stories, photographs, popular imagery, car advice columns, automotive journals, archival records, and personal correspondence – provide insight into women’s car use during this time period, they offer little illumination as to the obstacles women faced as drivers, the circumstances under which women acquired driver’s licenses, the meanings women ascribed to the automobile, and how women felt about the driving experience. What is missing from the existing automotive archives are the voices of women drivers.

In a 2002 The Journal of Transport History article, Walsh writes, “Sometimes women’s history has been in the form of finding missing pieces and discussing them. […] Often it has pushed down barriers to ask new questions and stimulate new approaches”. ⁸ In women’s history – automotive and otherwise – missing pieces may be recovered through the accumulation and examination of women’s oral histories. Oral histories, in this context, are not to be considered as a means to verify facts, but rather as a way to incorporate memory and narrative into the existing historical archive. Whereas traditional historical methods are apt to focus on significant events, oral history is more concerned about the meaning of the event within the life of the tellers. And because those who contribute oral histories are often individuals who have been unable to speak about themselves or be heard before, they are likely, writes Alessandro Portelli, “to seize the opportunity not only to answer our questions but also to volunteer stories of their own”. ⁹ As automotive history has – as a traditionally male discipline – limited the contributions and activities of female motorists, oral history provides the opportunity to add new knowledge to what is currently known. Note Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack, “the expression of women’s unique experience as women is often muted, particularly in any situation where women’s interests and experiences are at variance with those of men”. ¹⁰ Although feminist scholars have painstakingly recovered women’s automotive histories where none existed before, oral history holds the possibility of contributing to existing scholarship through the inclusion of women’s real-life automotive experiences.

Taking Walsh’s words as a call to action, this project relies upon the narratives of 21 elderly women to provide new insight into women’s automotive history. Developed from interviews with women aged 74–96, these rich oral histories not only aim to fill in the gaps about what is known about women’s relationship to cars, but offer an understanding and awareness of what owning and driving cars meant to American women of a particular generation. ¹¹ Calling upon Portelli’s concept of “living voices” – “voices that speak with us now” – this project reflects upon elderly women’s testimonies to consider how automotive experiences affected women’s lives in the past, and how the meaning of those experiences has been remembered and reconstructed over time. ¹² Due to the scarcity of automotive knowledge on women who came of driving age during the mid-twentieth century, information regarding the early practices and preferences of women drivers now in their 80s and 90s is limited at best. Oral history provides a means to not only recover the automotive experiences of the generations of women drivers currently missing from the historical record, but to also reflect upon the significance of those automotive experiences to women’s past and present lives.

Automotive history and the woman driver

Although American women have been driving since Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, it took nearly a century for their presence to be acknowledged in the automotive archives. The groundbreaking work of feminist scholars in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries forever transformed the perception of the woman driver. While classic automotive literature often positioned women as passive figures interested primarily in style, comfort, and ease of handling, the new automotive historians – including Scharff, Clarsen, Walsh, Franz, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, and Katherine Parkin – recognised and recovered the woman driver as an individual with purpose and agency. ¹³ Whether bringing attention to female objection to the early electric car; reflecting on the efforts of female motorists to become recognised as competent drivers; addressing how women’s entry into the work force influenced women’s driving practices; dispelling the notion of the woman driver as mechanically inept by drawing on the practice of tinkering; or unearthing how middle-class women adopted the automobile as a domestic technology; the aforementioned scholars situated the woman driver as an influential and significant historical actor.

Although scholarship on this generation of women drivers is limited in the historical record, driving practices of senior women are a growing subject of research in disciplines such as gerontology and social work. Through group and individual interviews, researchers have examined the driving challenges of senior adults, gender differences in senior driving practices, as well as the conditions and emotions surrounding driving cessation. ¹⁴ While the majority of this literature is concerned with the culmination of women’s driving lives, Anu Siren and Liisa Hakamies-Blomqvist – in a series of interviews with aging Swedish women – expand the inquiry to examine the personal meanings older women attach to cars as well as women’s experiences of marginalisation as drivers over a lifetime. ¹⁵ These studies – while focusing primarily on present driving conditions rather than prior automotive experiences – serve to bring needed attention to the importance of driving to women’s identities and independence.

This project adds to the current literature through the incorporation of driving histories from elderly women recruited from senior communities in Louisville, Kentucky and Farmington Hills, Michigan (a Detroit suburb). The selection of these geographical locations was based on opportunity – who I knew in the field and who would allow me to interview senior residents – rather than a purposeful strategy. ¹⁶ Although the women hailed from or had lived in 28 USA states (and one Canadian province) and declared both urban and rural backgrounds, they were not a racially diverse group. It should be noted, therefore, that the oral histories included in this project reflect a white, primarily middle-class automotive experience. ¹⁷ I went into the individual interviews with a set of questions focused on women’s early driving lives – why they drove, what they drove, how they used their cars, and how automobile ownership affected their lives. My initial objective was to supplement and complement existing research through consideration of the conditions and influences that determined whether a woman obtained a driver’s license; women’s attitudes about cars and the driving experience; and how the driving and car owning experiences of these women support or disrupt prewar, wartime, and postwar representations of women drivers. However, once engaged with the women I discovered that while they would respectfully answer the questions offered, they often had their own stories to tell. These unsolicited narratives spoke of automotive memories and meanings held onto over a lifetime. The women’s stories were not always factually reliable. Opal, an 88-year-old native Kentuckian, referred to a car of her past interchangeably as a yellow Thunderbird and Mustang. Yet more important than her memory lapses were the driving experiences connected to the vehicle and the importance of this particular yellow automobile to her young adult life. Consequently, while attempting to interpret these interviews I engaged in what Portelli describes as cultural work – “trying to understand what is on people’s minds, how these events are remembered and told” – so that I might connect what is known about the facts to what is known about the narratives. ¹⁸ Taking Portelli’s oral history principles into consideration, this project not only attempts to answer questions regarding women’s early automotive experience, but also calls upon women’s stories to uncover the meanings the automobile held for this particular group of individuals during an important era of women’s and automotive history.

To add to what is known about women’s automotive history, conversations with this group of elderly women focused on three aspects of their early driving lives. First of all, this study looks at women’s early driving practices, considering the circumstances that led women to acquire a driver’s license. ¹⁹ Second, it directs attention to women’s relationship to the automobile through an examination of the cars they drove, how their cars were used, and the significance of the automobile to their lives and subjectivities. Finally, through an exploration of women’s car stories, it reflects upon instances of courage, innovation, humour, and joy in women’s lifelong driving experiences. As this examination will demonstrate, recovering women’s automotive experiences through the process of oral history provides a unique – and dare I say fleeting – opportunity to add to women’s automotive archives, as well as provide context to current gerontology studies, in significant and enlightening ways. ²⁰

Women and driving

Although, as Scharff contends, elite women enthusiastically took to the automobile in the early motor age, during the 1930s and 1940s – decades marked by the Depression and Second World War – women’s presence behind the wheel was relatively uncommon. While, as Gary Cross suggests, the attainment of a driver’s license was increasingly viewed as a rite of passage – and mark of masculinity – for the young male driver as early as 1930, American society did not hold the same expectations for young women. ²¹ The narratives gathered for this project cannot be considered representative of all women; however, the stories women tell suggest that factors such as geographical location, social class, and marital status were often influential as to when or whether women learned to drive.

The women who grew up in rural areas spoke of getting behind the wheel at a young age to help on a farm or a family business. As they freely admitted, driving restrictions in small towns were often relaxed giving underage teenage girls permission to get behind the wheel, even if they had to sit on a cushion to do so. Now 86, Penny grew up in rural Illinois and learned to drive at 14 to help her folks in the grocery business. As she recollected, “Nobody cared quite so much about rules of the road or driver’s licenses”. Eighty-six-year-old Marian – who hails from a small town in Ohio – started driving as a child. She asserted, “I drove when I was nine years old because I grew up on a farm and my dad let me drive the tractor”. As Walsh notes, due to their familiarity with farm machinery as well as teams and buggies, “[rural women] were less daunted by the prospect of driving than their urban counterparts”. ²² Fathers, brothers, and boyfriends often served as instructors for these enthusiastic young women. In these rural locations, driver’s training took place not on official courses, but on family farms, country back roads, and cemeteries. Unlike their rural sisters, the women who grew up in cities were likely to make use of buses or streetcars for transportation needs. They put off driving until a turn of events – college, employment, or marriage – made attaining a license imperative. Location played a part not only in the commencement of driving, but also in its cessation. Those who retired in unfamiliar places were more likely to give up their licenses rather than learn transportation patterns of a strange city. The majority of women in the Louisville senior community relocated to be close to family members. As these sons and daughters had cars, the women’s need for self-transport was not acute. However women who remained in the area in which they spent most of their driving lives – which includes the majority of those in the suburban Detroit facility – were familiar with local neighbourhoods and a city-style of driving. Consequently, they were likely to stay behind the wheel longer, often well into their 90s. Beatrice, an 88-year-old Detroit native, still enjoys the independence of driving. As she declared, “I hope I have at least another five years going”.

Social class was also a contributor to the attainment of a driver’s license. White women with privileged upbringings – daughters of doctors, car dealers, or small business owners – were not only more likely to be driving at a young age, but also to have their own cars. Many indulgent dads purchased automobiles as birthday, college graduation, and wedding gifts. The daughters – now in their 80s and 90s – remember those gifts fondly. Penny – whose father was a Ford car dealer – received a chartreuse and black 1950 Ford Crestliner for her 21st birthday. Joanna’s 14th birthday gift was a used Plymouth. As she recalled, “I was very appreciative when my daddy gave it to me”. Young women who were able to afford college – less than 4 per cent of the female population in 1940 – frequently put off getting a car until after graduation despite knowing how to drive. ²³ Often a new place of employment was the impetus for a driver’s license. Susan, an 88-year-old Iowa native, was 21 when the opportunity to move out of town with her sister for job opportunities made acquiring a car and a driver’s license a necessity. When a young woman’s station in life rose – through work or marriage – her priorities became a driver’s license and a car, in that order. Ninety-four-year-old Marlene learned to drive in order to get to and from her first teaching assignment. As she noted, “I didn’t want to take the street car anymore. So I got a little old car and drove to work”. These narratives suggest that the conditions under which a woman acquired a driver’s license may have been precipitated by a desire to drive, but were also determined by necessity, opportunity, or good fortune.

The narratives of the women suggest that when young and single, there was not always a pressing need to get a driver’s license. Rural women could walk or depend on a boyfriend for getting around, whereas those in cities often relied on public transportation. Susan, who grew up in a small Iowa town, didn’t learn to drive until she was 21. As the 88-year-old recalled, “not everybody drove in high school back when I was starting”. Maureen, a Detroit native, waited until age 20 to acquire a driver’s license for, as she explained, “I didn’t have a car”. While young men were likely to start driving as soon as, or perhaps even before, they were of legal driving age, it was not uncommon for young women to wait until marriage to get behind the wheel. As they assumed the domestic responsibilities expected of young wives, women learned to drive out of necessity. Writes Walsh, “Mrs. America was learning that she could not be an efficient homemaker if she could not drive”. ²⁴ In addition, notes Walsh, as young couples moved out to the suburbs, women found it necessary to drive to avoid being “marooned” while husbands were at the workplace. ²⁵

Marriage, as the women related, provided a new set of transportation challenges. Most young couples could only afford one car. Although car makers had promoted the necessity of a second car, courting the “female consumer in advertising by recognizing her independence and sense of responsibility”, two-car families were in short supply well into the late 1950s. ²⁶ Consequently, husbands and wives often engaged in complicated car-sharing arrangements. City women who worked remained dependent on public transport, organized a drop off and pick up system with spouses, or participated in car pools with co-workers. Stay-at-home moms – if they wanted use of the family car – were usually up at dawn with kids in tow driving husbands to work and fetching them in time for dinner. Remembering her time as a young wife with a husband in medical school, 91-year-old Joanna recollected, “I took him to Johns Hopkins every day for two years. In our one car”. Eighty-nine-year-old Linda’s husband often travelled for work. As she recalled, “I would drive, we would go to the airport and drop him off. Then I had the car and drove back and I used it for errands”. Those with husbands serving in the Second World War not only needed to learn to drive, but were also responsible for vehicle maintenance and care in their husband’s absence. As Daniel Delis Hill notes, since no new cars were manufactured for the duration of the war, “that meant special care of the old car”. ²⁷ Ninety-two-year-old Cora remarked, “My husband was in the service. So I needed a car for transportation. I got tired of taking the bus”. As 92-year-old Mavis recalled, when her husband joined the military, she inherited “a rattletrap that needed to be worked on”.

The women’s narratives also reveal that, although advertising most often featured men as the primary family drivers, that responsibility was taken over by women when husbands were unable to transport themselves for physical or medical reasons. Noted Sheryl, a 91-year-old Kentucky native, “I learned to drive and got a driver’s license because my husband was ill and was hospital confined for a period of time”. Ninety-four-year-old Maureen’s husband had an eye problem. Consequently, as she confided, “I drove everywhere. Every mile”. These women learned to drive out of necessity, as husbands relied on their wives not only to chauffeur children, run family errands, and fulfil domestic responsibilities, but also to transport them to work, to doctor’s appointments, and to pilot family road trips. ²⁸

Yet regardless of geographical location, marital status, or class, whether or not a young woman learned to drive was ultimately dependent on whether someone was willing and able to teach her. As very few of the young women had driving mothers, the most likely candidate for driving instructor was a father, brother, or boyfriend. While some of these male family members and friends taught the young women enthusiastically and voluntarily, others had to be persuaded to do so. The stereotypes regarding women drivers were pervasive during the eras in which these women came of driving age. It was a common sentiment among the male population that women had no business in the driver’s seat. During the first half of the twentieth century, writes Michael Berger, “women at the wheel posed a serious threat to long-established ideas and practices”. ²⁹ In terms of car use, parents were much more lenient with boys than girls; in a 1949 Purdue survey, writes Gary Cross, 30 per cent of parents allowed sons to use the family car, whereas only 16 per cent of dads and 18 per cent of moms awarded the same auto privileges to daughters. ³⁰ Consequently, it often took an open-minded man, and a resolute young woman, to make attainment of a driver’s license a reality.

Women and cars

Throughout the automobile’s storied history, automakers have recognized the potential of the female market. Initially faced with a conundrum – how to appeal to the female consumer without offending men – automakers developed marketing campaigns that relied on men’s and women’s “unchanging biological natures”. ³¹ This dual strategy, argues Scharff, was designed by industry promoters as a means to “preserve their own masculine identities and to serve their economic interests”. ³² The larger, more powerful vehicle was marketed to men; women – as wives, mothers, and homemakers – were encouraged to purchase the practical family car as a means to fulfil their domestic roles. This strategy is evident as early as 1922, when Chevrolet promoted its newest model as “especially suitable for wives to drive the family provider to and from the station or the children to and from school”. ³³ Despite the lean car buying years of the Depression era, auto makers continued to woo the female customer in this manner. During the post-Second World War era, a common Ford theme was to promote the purchase of two cars – “one for the bread-winning husband, another for the bread-making wife”. ³⁴ During the late 1940s and early 1950s, advertisers continued to promote the conventional view regarding woman’s place in the home, appealing to women’s roles as important decision makers and enthusiastic consumers.

The narratives of this group of women suggest that, despite efforts of automakers to appeal to the female motorist, most young women had to wait until their household was financially stable in order to become a two-car family. Until that milestone, women did not have much choice when it came to what they drove. When first entering marriage, most shared a car with husbands. While some women brought cars to a household, most simply used their husband’s car when it was available. A second car was often acquired when children appeared on the scene. These vehicles were most often described as “jalopies”, “clunkers”, or “old and cheap”. As Cross notes, despite the efforts of auto manufacturers to sell new products, most in the market for a car bought used; in the first decade of the post war era, two thirds of the autos sold were pre-owned. ³⁵ However, often isolated at home, women were grateful for anything that offered them a degree of independence. As Patsy, an 84-year-old Michigan resident asserted, “I’m not very fussy about a car. I just want it to get me there and not need much maintenance”. Of the Rambler she owned when first married, 81-year-old Adele stated, “It was OK. I mean nothing special. It was something to drive if I wanted to go somewhere”.

As women most often started out married life sharing an automobile, the opportunity to have a car of one’s own was welcomed regardless of the vehicle’s origin or condition. The first car of an 89-year-old Philadelphia native was acquired when her husband had the opportunity to purchase the company car he was driving. As she remarked, “So then I got that basically. I really didn’t have a choice”. Eighty-eight-year-old Susan, who grew up in Iowa City, shared a car for ten years with her spouse before obtaining one of her own. As she noted, “It was a Mercury. And it was so old it didn’t even have a title to it”. Often a woman’s car was received as a hand-me-down from a family member. After sharing her husband’s car through four-and-soon-to-be-five children, Marian, who grew up in Southwest Detroit, grabbed at the opportunity to get an old stick-shift ‘55 Chevy from a brother headed to the Peace Corps. As the 82-year-old recollected, “the pedal on the accelerator was broken off, and he had stuck a red sponge ball on the stem of the pedal. I was so excited to have it!” Although they may have imagined themselves behind the wheel of a shiny new Ford or Pontiac, the women spoke of determinedly negotiating with husbands, friends, and family members to get a car – any car – of their own.

A surprising number of the women interviewed – not only in Detroit but in Louisville as well – worked in auto-related industries or had friends or relatives who did. This allowed them to purchase a car a family member had previously driven, secure the inside track on a good used vehicle, or take advantage of an automotive employee discount. When working at an auto dealership as a bookkeeper, Susan was always on the lookout for a good used car. As the 88-year-old native Iowan noted, “I just picked out the cars I could get as cheap as possible. Because I didn’t have any money! And [the dealer] would tell me if it was a good car or not”. Lydia’s father-in-law, who worked for Chrysler, would purchase cars on an employee discount and sell them to his son and daughter-in-law after the vehicles logged 60,000 miles. The 86-year-old native Detroiter exclaimed, “I hated those big cars”. However, the women couldn’t be fussy about these automobiles; the practical value outweighed any desire for a particular make or model. As the narratives suggest, in the early part of their driving lives, women made sensible car selections because in most cases there wasn’t any alternative.

As couples became more financially solvent, women’s influence in car purchasing decisions increased. The advertising principle that, “women had substantial and growing influence on purchasing decisions”, was often reflected in the narratives of this group of 80- and 90-year-old women. ³⁶ Married women often accompanied husbands to the dealership in order to have a voice in car choice. While Opal’s husband handed over the money for the car, she always made her opinion known. As the 88-year-old Kentuckian recalled, “I usually say my husband let me choose what car I wanted”. Jess, an 80-year-old West Virginia native, remarked, “It was always a joint purchase. After 57 years of marriage I guess you do everything together”. If husbands purchased cars without their wives’ input, they often found themselves heading back to the dealership. As Penny – an 86-year-old Illinois native – recollected, “[my husband] took a notion that he would buy me one of those Cadillac convertibles. I hated that car. Wasn’t long before we got rid of it”. Women who worked were more likely to make their own car purchase decisions. Now 88, Beatrice began choosing her own vehicles once she started teaching and got involved with the credit union. As the Detroit native noted, “Everything was in my husband’s name. I decided to be independent”.

Although most in this group made practical vehicle choices throughout most of their driving lives, there were a few who at one point owned luxury or performance cars. Some of the women engaged in car collecting hobbies with husbands, whereas others received sports cars as gifts. When a young mother, Patsy received a Camaro convertible one Christmas, followed in subsequent years by a series of Corvettes. As the now 86-year-old confessed, “My husband liked to buy me cars. And I liked to let him”. Ninety-two-year-old Cora recalls how her father-in-law purchased new two cars – a Camaro for her, a Ford Fairlane for her husband – so they could “enjoy some of the money” he had set aside before he passed away. Convertibles were a popular car subject among this group of women. While only a few had actually owned them, almost all of the women had – at some point in time – yearned for a flashy ragtop. Despite the insistence that the model of the car didn’t matter, and that a car’s importance was based on its role as a reliable and functional means of transportation, the convertible held a special fascination. When questioned about her favourite car, a 94-year-old former Marine waxed eloquently about a Ford convertible from her past. As Marlene reminisced, “that was an outstanding automobile. I just loved it. And that car could go!” When asked what car she desired but never owned, an 81-year-old lifelong Michigander remarked, “back then I thought that convertibles were really, really neat. But I never really dreamed of having one”. For her first automotive purchase after an ugly divorce, 76-year-old Sharon chose a Volvo convertible. As the Ohio native noted, “I loved it. I put the top down a lot. I really liked that feeling”. Although the women’s narratives tended to emphasize automobile functionality over fun, the wistfulness with which they regarded the convertible suggests the focus on practicality reflected life’s realities – both financial and cultural – rather than the women's true sentiments about automobiles.

While the primary use of the automobile among this group of women was practical – driving husbands to work, taking kids to school, and performing everyday household tasks – it also played an important role in family vacations. As transportation scholar James Flink notes, “with the advent of the Model T and improved roads, the automobile outing and automobile vacation became middle-class institutions”. ³⁷ Marriages often started off with a road trip. As a young bride who married in 1946, Joanna drove from Baltimore to Washington in a “little 1915 Plymouth convertible”. Once children were on the scene, family vacations were often structured around visits to long-distance relatives. As 80-year-old Jess recalled, “his parents and my parents were both back in West Virginia. So we would travel many, many, many times from Delaware on Route 40, clear over to West Virginia”. Although married women relied on automobile travel for vacations and shared driving responsibilities with husbands, they most often considered the car as a means to get to a destination rather than an experience in itself. Single women, on the other hand, were much more likely to enjoy the ride, and described road trips centred on activities such as bird watching or visiting National parks. As 86-year-old Marian recollected, “I’ve driven the whole coast of Washington, California, Oregon. It always had to do with the nature I would see. I’ve identified over 500 birds in my lifetime”.

While there were a few bona-fide car aficionados among this group of senior women, the majority viewed the automobile more as a practical necessity than a source of pleasure. As 88-year-old Bess confessed, “I still really don’t enjoy driving. I would never just get in the car and go for a ride just to do it. But I liked the independence of doing it”. Although she depended on her husband to select a vehicle as well as put gas in it, an 89-year-old homemaker appreciated the automobile for what it allowed her to do. As Linda remarked,

well it was very nice to be more or less independent and be able to just get up and go when you had to or wanted to, not being more or less being tied down to the house and waiting for a weekend when our car came around.

Women’s car stories

Portelli writes, “what makes oral sources important and fascinating is precisely the fact that they do not passively record the facts, but elaborate upon them and create meaning through the labor of memory and the filter of language”. ³⁹ While the previous sections reflect women’s answers to a prepared set of questions – which emerged from what we know about women and cars from current scholarship – the following paragraphs endeavour to capture the feelings women shared about their driving experience through unsolicited stories. Although memories of dates, places, and cars were sometimes fuzzy among this group of aging women, what is clear is how early automobile experiences impacted the women’s lives in a myriad of ways. While the women’s stories are too numerous to include here, I have attempted to capture the spirit of the narratives by focusing on four recurring themes: courage, innovation, humour, and joy.

Although most women born in the 1920s and 1930s were likely to marry, they spent a great deal of early wedded life on their own. Young wives of the 1940s were often war brides, and as Walsh notes, with husbands off to battle, learned to drive out of necessity. ⁴⁰ As car production was suspended during the war years, and finances were often tight with men away, women had to manage with aging, unpredictable and unreliable automobiles. In the 1950s, as families moved out to the suburbs, many young mothers found themselves isolated while their husbands spent long hours in the city. While automotive images from the 1940s and 1950s often present women drivers as cheerful and unflappable moms, the stories told by the senior women reveal early driving lives that were neither as simple nor predictable as period representations would have us believe. As they confronted driving situations that were sometimes frustrating and often frightening, these women displayed determination, resilience, as well as a fair amount of courage.

Women’s car stories often reflect on the dangers of driving alone. ⁴¹ As 79-year-old Bess recollected, while a young woman driving in her Kentucky hometown, a strange man entered her car at a stoplight. When, as she recalled, he let it be known “what he was going to do to me”, she turned to him and declared, “do you see that telephone pole down there? Well, I’m going to be hitting it at 70 miles an hour”. Not surprisingly, the man looked at the “crazy” young woman and quickly exited the car. Ninety-two-year-old Mavis shared stories of driving alone in the southern United States, often with her young daughter in the backseat. While driving an old car with warn tie rods to the South Dakota Air Force Base to visit her husband, she encountered an unexpected snow storm. As Mavis recalled, “I’d never driven in the snow. But I just kept going and my little girl was scared; she didn’t like it”. When the roads became impassable, she stopped in a strange town for lodging, only to be asked by the motel owner “if I wanted to earn the price of the room”. Despite the precarious road conditions and zero visibility, she courageously drove herself and her young daughter to safety.

While life in the 1950s suburbs is often painted as idyllic, women who chose not to share cars with spouses were likely to drive broken-down vehicles donated by family members or purchased with “pin” money. ⁴² These young mothers often experienced medical emergencies in the middle of the night and vehicle breakdowns in the middle of nowhere. Eighty-two-year-old Maureen told of travelling home from a family gathering on Christmas Eve with five children when the car overheated. As she recalled, “No one stopped for me. I didn’t have boots on, there was snow on the ground, and it was about eleven at night”. She locked the children in the car, walked a few blocks to a party store that was about to close, and called her husband at work who “came and rescued us”.

Automotive scholars portray the woman driver in history as primarily concerned with comfort, safety, functionality, and cargo space. Automotive promotional material of the 1940s and 1950s describes the woman behind the wheel as stylish, smart, sophisticated, and sensible. However, as the stories of this group of senior women suggest, women who travelled on their own, in adverse weather conditions on ill-maintained and dangerous roads, in aging and unreliable rust-buckets, or in the middle of the night with feverous children in tow, all without the communication devices relied on today, can also be characterized as resourceful, determined, and courageous.

In women’s automotive history, scholars have recovered stories of how women modified automobiles for their own use through the practice of “tinkering”. ⁴³ While the women of these historical accounts were interested in altering the automobile for work on the farm during the early twentieth century, the stories relayed by this current group of senior women reflected on adapting the automobile for family travel in the postwar era. ⁴⁴ As mothers were most often in charge of the children on road trip vacations, it was up to them to devise ways to keep young passengers quiet, safe, and occupied. The collected narratives describe young moms who were creative, resourceful, and innovative.

Before the advent of car seats and seat belts, moms had to come up with methods to keep children contained. Eighty-year-old Jess remembers laying down the car’s back seat to put in a playpen for the baby. Although, as she remarked, “you’d be put in jail for doing that today”, it was an innovative solution to traveling with a small child. Seventy-six-year-old Sharon remembers her VW Beetle as a great transporter for a restless infant. As she recalled, “we could put the baby in the back, sitting on the engine. You know the engine would hum and put the baby to sleep”. Linda’s young son liked to sit between his parents on the front seat’s pull-down armrest. As the 89-year-old Philadelphia native recalled, “we’d put him on the ‘hump’ and then my husband would just tie a belt around him so he’d sit there”. Although the women realize that today’s automobiles are better suited to the needs of young families, and how solutions called upon in the past would be frowned upon in the present day, during the postwar era, innovative mothers used the means and materials available to them to make trips enjoyable for the youngest passengers.

The women also shared stories of trips in which they reconfigured vehicles for their own use. Before chain hotels were commonplace, decent lodgings in out-of-the-way places were few and far between. Thus, women often called upon their own resourcefulness to convert automobiles into cozy sleeping quarters when on the road. Eighty-four-year-old Patsy recalls a trip to Colorado taken before her children were born. Arriving in a ghost town without available lodging, the Detroit native recalls,

At the time we had a station wagon and I had prepared it with curtains. So we used the facilities at the gas station and stayed in the car overnight. We saw the backs of these run-down buildings and we enjoyed it.

Automotive mishaps were also a common theme among the senior women, often told with a sense of humour. Ninety-one-year-old Sheryl reflected on an embarrassing car moment of her past. After stopping at the gas station owned by her brother-in-law, she pulled out only to get her car stuck on top of a concrete slab, the vehicle’s front and back wheels spinning in the air. As the Kentucky native confessed, “I was kind of the laughing stock of the community for a while. I heard about that for many years”. When exiting the police station after renewing her expired license, Maureen found her car parked in a very tight spot. Nervous about pulling out with a policeman watching from the station window, the Detroiter walked to the local gas station and told the attendant, “I need some help un-parking my car”. After he successfully removed the vehicle, Maureen offered to pay for his help. The young man responded, “Lady, you don’t owe me anything. This is my story for the day”.

The stories also included recollections of car antics. Jess recalls driving her dad’s car with a group of friends who were planning some Halloween mischief. One friend got out of the car, saw someone coming, and attempted to get back in as Jess pulled away. As the 80-year-old West Virginia native exclaimed, “she was screaming and yelling, putting her foot back into the car. If my dad had known he would have killed me”. Bess spoke fondly of how as a single woman she would take her cousins on day trips to different places in Kentucky. While the purpose was to have a good time, she did set down rules for her “boy crazy” cousin. As the 79-year-old explained, “I would tell her, you go with me you come home with me. And you’re not picking up any boys”. While the women’s stories are enjoyable in themselves, they not only reveal the importance of cars as personal transportation, but also serve as touchstones to irreplaceable memories of a young woman’s driving life.

Finally, while there were women who were ambivalent about the act of driving, what emerged from many of the stories was the sense of joy driving often inspired in women behind the wheel. Single women in particular – whether unmarried, widowed, or divorced – were especially effusive about their driving experiences. Young women who could drive and had access to a car were the self-appointed chauffeur for movie dates with friends, trips to the local swimming hole, or church-related activities. Brenda, a 90-year-old Detroit native recalled, “my folks would let me have the car for the evening as long as I was home by eleven o’clock. It was a small car; I would take five or six gals and they’d pile in the back seat”. Maureen – an 82-year-old Michigan resident – remembers taking pleasure in driving as a teenager because “it was the grown-up thing to do”. As a young woman, 88-year old Susan enjoyed driving because it made her feel “like somebody important”.

As single adults, women loved driving for the opportunity to go places and see things they never thought possible. Many used their vacation days to take road trips across the country. Brenda, a 90-year-old native Detroiter, has driven to 49 of the 50 states. As she declared, “I would take my vacation and I would plan a trip driving to some area of the country. That’s how I got to see them all”. Eighty-five-year-old Helen, who grew up on Long Island, appreciated how driving allowed her to make trips on her own “to go bird watching in wonderful places in the United States”. Others called upon the automobile to get them away from the pressures of everyday life, if only for a little while. As Marian, an 86-year-old Ohio native exclaimed, “When I don’t know what to do I get out and drive to a Metro Park or something”. Teddy found driving a source of solace after her husband passed. As the 94-year-old remembered, “it was not unusual for me to get in my car and go down to Louisville for dinner. Just by myself. I didn’t like just sitting home thinking about him not being there”. To these women, the automobile served not as “the vehicle through which she did much of her most significant work”, ⁴⁵ but as a source of relaxation, exhilaration, and joy.

Conclusion

As Walsh notes, the majority of gendered approaches to automotive history have focused on the dawn of the motor age. Scharff, Clarsen, Franz, and Cowan were all instrumental in recovering the early twentieth-century woman driver from the automotive archives. While Parkin’s recent work spans decades of women’s automobile use through an examination of the longstanding woman driver stereotype from the early auto age until the present day, Walsh has singularly devoted the majority of her auto research to the female motorist of the postwar era. Much of the information gleaned from this project complements and supports Walsh’s painstaking scholarship. However, it also acknowledges Walsh’s appeal to employ different conceptual approaches in the recovery of women’s automotive history. ⁴⁶

The oral histories gathered for this project add a new dimension to what is currently known about women’s relationship to the automobile during the prewar, wartime, and postwar eras. It is by no means inclusive; as the interviewees were primarily white and middle class, the narratives focus on a particular automotive experience. However, what the collected stories contribute is a deeper comprehension of the social context in which (white) women learned to drive, insight into how women felt about cars and the driving experience; and new information on the driving lives of underrepresented generations of female motorists. Portelli writes, “oral history is about the historical significance of personal experience on one hand, and the personal impact of historical matters on the other”. ⁴⁷ The inclusion of women’s personal automotive experiences into the automotive archives provides an opportunity to embellish, deepen, amplify, and perhaps trouble existing automotive scholarship.

What these narratives also reveal is that women’s car use and driving experience was more varied and complicated than the dominant narrative. While the women relied on the automobile for household tasks and for carrying children, they also called upon it for making deliveries for the family business; transporting cars for family dealerships; traveling on dangerous roads alone with young children; teaching classes in auto repair and maintenance; ⁴⁸ touring the continental United States, taking young friends on joyrides; getting to work and to school; transporting ailing husbands to doctor appointments; and countless other uses. Although their car choices leaned towards the practical, they also dreamt of convertibles, sports cars, and performance vehicles. And despite the prevailing notion of women’s driving experience as one-dimensional, the women’s car stories offer demonstrations of courage, innovation, humour, and joy.

As Anderson and Jack note, “oral history provides an invaluable means of generating new insights about women’s experiences of themselves and their worlds”. ⁴⁹ The oral histories of this group of elderly women contribute important new knowledge to existing automotive scholarship. Including women’s voices in the historical record not only amplifies and substantiates what is already known, but humanizes the current understanding of the relationship between women and cars. Reflecting on the absence of literature on women in car culture 30 years ago, Charles Sanford wrote, “What is needed is both an intimate feminine viewpoint from several perspectives about women’s experience with cars and fairly objective, even statistical, studies of the same experience”. ⁵⁰ This undertaking provides one such viewpoint of a particular group of women drivers. It is only a start; in order for automotive history to reflect the experiences of a more diverse population of female motorists, it is imperative to collect the narratives of underrepresented groups. Although scholars have begun to investigate the African-American automotive experience, the driving lives of women of colour – which in most cases differ considerably from those presented here – are in dire need of examination. ⁵¹ May this project be the first of many to gather women’s “living voices” – through the practice of oral history – for inclusion into the automotive archives.