Women drivers
Subtitle: romancing the motorcar in the age of the flapper
By: Georgine Clarsen.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780801884658
Subjects: Automobile ownership -- Australia -- History -- 20th century; Automobile ownership -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century; Automobile ownership -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Women automobile drivers -- History -- 20th century; Women consumers -- History -- 20th century; Feminism -- History -- 20th century; Women -- Social life and customs -- 20th century; Nineteen twenties
Description: "Eat My Dust challenges the received wisdom that men embraced automobile technology more naturally than did women. Georgine Clarsen highlights the personal stories of women from the United States, Britain, Australia, and colonial Africa from the early days of motoring until 1930. She notes the different ways in which these women embraced automobile technology in their national and cultural context. As mechanics and taxi drivers - like Australian Alice Anderson and Brit Sheila O'Neil - and long-distance adventurers and political activists - like South Africans Margaret Belcher and Ellen Budgell and American suffragist Sara Bard Field - women sought to define the technology in their own terms and according to their own needs. They challenged traditional notions of femininity through their love of cars and proved they were articulate, confident, and mechanically savvy motorists in their own right. More than new chapters in automobile history, these stories locate women motorists within twentieth-century debates about class, gender, sexuality, race, and nation."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Movement in a minor key : dilemmas of the woman motorist; title: A war product : the British motoring girl and her garage; title: A car made by English ladies for others of their sex : the feminist factory and the lady's car; title: The politics of automobile consumption in the United States; title: Campaigns on wheels : American automobiles and a suffrage of consumption; title: "The woman who does" : a Melbourne women's motor garage; title: Driving Australian modernity : "conquering" Australia by car; title: Machines as the measure of women : Cape-to-Cairo by automobile.