Domesticating the Car: Women's Road Trips

Women's literature from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf is mostly a literature about waiting, and usually waiting for love. Denied the freedom to roam outside themselves, women turned inward, into their emotions.... For centuries it was frowned upon for women to travel without escort, chaperone, or husband. To journey was to put one at risk not only physically but morally. --Mary Morris Travel writer Mary Morris, in her comment about women's literature, appropriately identifies Virginia Woolf as the endpoint of such a tradition. (1) Although some may contest this sweeping indictment of women's writing as stationary--and there are surely exceptions--she identifies a widespread, if not universal, characteristic. The twentieth century, however, brings a marked change. The advent of the automobile allowed women to hit the road in numbers and to do it alone. The first woman to drive cross country, Alice Huyler Ramsay, did so in 1909, only six years after Dr. H. Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker completed the first transcontinental road trip in 1903. Ramsay was followed by Blanche Stuart Scott in 1910 and Anita King, the first actually to make the drive solo, in 1915. (2) This development opens up not just opportunities for women, but opportunities for women's literature. No longer relegated to waiting, women wrote increasingly about journeys, about mobility, and about the power inherent in this increased freedom. The motif of the journey, so long associated with men, from Odysseus to Sal Paradise, comes up more and more in women's texts. But if western culture and western literature have been predicated upon the woman in the house, then the presence of women on the road radically unsettles assumptions of domesticity, gendered identity, and gendered literature. Sidonie Smith has observed, "If traveling, being on the road, makes a man a man--and makes masculinity and its power visible--what does it make of a woman, who is at once a subject as home and a subject at home?" (3) Or, as Karen Lawrence asks, "how is femininity constructed when its relation to the domestic is radically altered?" (4) To take her question even further, how are femininity and domesticity constructed on the road--and in a car? In order to explore these issues through women's road novels, one must also take into consideration how the presence of women on the road transforms the narrative of the road itself. Women on the road may unsettle gender and domesticity; women who write about being on the road challenge the form itself. There are many ways, of course, of being on the road. Recent theory abounds with references to nomads, migrants, travelers, refugees, and exiles. However, not all movement is available to all people and mobility, once thought to challenge the dominant center, is now recognized as situated and often privileged. And yet gender remains an issue. As Janet Wolff argues in a very influential essay, "just as the practices and ideologies of actual travel operate to exclude or pathologize women, so the use of that vocabulary as metaphor necessarily produces androcentric tendencies in theory." (5) If, as Wolff claims, there is an "intrinsic relationship between masculinity and travel," then to explore women's travel demands some significant re-theorizing and re-contextualizing of concerns of mobility. (6) Much work in that direction is currently taking place in a variety of disciplines, often concentrating on the ways that travel refigures, challenges, and revises women's relation to the domestic. As feminist geographer Linda McDowell points out, "Travel, even the idea of traveling, challenges the spatial association between home and women that has been so important in structuring the social construction of femininity in the 'West,' in Western social theories and institutional practices." (7) But "travel" is a generic term; how one travels plays a crucial role in journey narratives and fictions, one often overlooked in studies of the genre. …