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Women Behind the Wheel: An Unexpected and Personal History of the Car
Nancy A. Nichols
New York, NY: Pegasus, 2024.
I’ve exceeded the speed limit on Texas interstates, spun around after taking a turn too fast, and once changed my outfit while driving. I learned to drive in a 1971 three-on-the-tree Chevy pick-up and my daily driver is a six-speed, turbo-charged Japanese fast hatch. I bought the car from a woman at a large dealership staffed mostly by men. Is driving while female really the revolutionary concept it once was?
According to Nancy A. Nichols’s Women Behind the Wheel, the idea of women drivers as something other than an oddity has taken decades to mature from novelty trailblazers such as Bertha Benz who hijacked her husband’s “Patent Motor Wagon” in 1888 to the more than 120 female NASCAR drivers on the starting line since the sport began in 1949. (It is odd that Nichols does not mention one of literature’s first women drivers, the intrepid Claire Boltwood in Sinclair Lewis’s 1919 novel Free Air.) No one questions the presence of women on the roads, although there are plenty of jokes about them, but what Nichols, a seasoned reporter and writer, wants to explore is “how the car came to be our most gendered technology.” At this late remove, haven’t we all made our peace with the fact that some cars are chick cars and some are muscle cars, and that’s just how it is? If that is the case, the subtitle of Nichols’s book—“an unexpected and personal history of the car”—is all the more welcome.
An energetic and engaging writer, Nichols might have clogged her book with citations from the numerous sociological studies and books that examine women drivers—safety statistics, insurance costs, buying preferences—and she does call on them when it suits her point. A point which is, it must be said, one that often verges on joyless censoriousness. Time and again, Nichols relates the ways in which the car has changed women’s lives; as a wife, mother, and professional writer, she testifies to how at various times in her life, the car has been shelter, confessional, mobile political statement, and cultural touchstone. But women have paid the price, Nichols notes. She relates that women drivers experience more stress, they have more accidents, their children may experience birth defects caused by car exhaust, they are slow adopters of new technology such as electric vehicles, and they are complicit in the “great consumer lie that is car culture.” Most of all, cars and their environmental consequences (fossil fuels and all that plastic) have occasioned a great deal of pearl-clutching.
Raised in Waukegan, Illinois, Nancy and her sister were daughters of a secretary and a used car salesman. Nichols’s portrait of her father in his bright leisure suits and slicked-back hair, a cigarette clamped in his teeth as he gunned his Dodge Charger around town, is vivid if overdrawn. The author’s long-suffering mother, her youth and ambition tested by poverty and domestic abuse, finally escapes her marriage and dies young from some sort of heart event brought on by alcohol, smoking, and prescription drugs. For her father, the car was his livelihood and his downfall—a head-on accident left him with a traumatic brain injury; for her mother, the car restored her independence and reignited some of the romance that had been missing in her years as a married woman. These family vignettes are the high points of the book: heartfelt, unsentimental, and full of telling detail.
For the most part, though, the book’s memoir sections are more like momentary detours. Returning to her central concern with gender, Nichols spends much of her time on the idea of cars and sexuality: car as the site of romance, illicit sex, and sexual violence; the car’s sexual mystique; sexually suggestive car vocabulary; the performative nature of cars and driving; and, of course, the car’s place in pop culture. We are also reminded that women are often subject to the “pink tax,” disproportionately high rates for insurance, inflated sticker prices, and excessive repair prices. Even the car’s constantly evolving safety measures continue to leave women unprotected, writes Nichols, by “failing to accurately represent women.” But the problem goes back to the drawing board: “[G]ender bias in automobile design continues to wreak havoc on women’s bodies,” Nichols claims, citing the current trend for vehicles with heavier curb weights, powerful engines, and seatbelts that, while effective, fail to accommodate the anatomical differences of women’s bodies.
Certainly, the car represented liberation as well as limitations for women. Where once women’s work centered on the home, with the advent of cars and jobs outside the home, women had more freedom, both personal and economic—“Woman’s Place is in the Ford!” declared one 1949 Ford ad. Still, car manufacturers loved to remind women drivers that they would find cars most useful for motherly duties such as grocery shopping and child pick-up. Some manufacturers marketed models directly to women with features such as easy-care upholstery, smooth operation, and seatback racks for children’s toys. The car provided much that changed women’s lives, not least an expansion of life beyond the home and into the burgeoning suburbs, but in many ways, much about women’s roles in society was unchanged. “Cars created the possibility for connection and commerce at the same time that they created a unique form of isolation. Women reaped enormous rewards and paid an enormous price.”
Nichols gathers some droll and often odd moments in the history of women and cars, especially in relation to advertising. In the postwar era as consumer goods became more plentiful, women’s fashion options multiplied; what women saw in the movies and in magazines was replicated in the real world. Automobile marketers capitalized on this impulse, positioning the car as the ultimate fashion statement. To our eyes, car ads from the mid-twentieth century may look sexist, but their sophisticated copy and sleek design demonstrated considerable marketing insight. Ford’s 1953 “Motor Mates” promotion showcased a line of well-constructed ladies’ coats and snazzy handbags in fabrics that matched the interior of the Ford Victoria. Cadillac took the couture route, commissioning a French designer to create a line of dramatic gowns to complement the 1956 Sedan de Ville. More than mere window dressing, the Cadillac ad has an aspirational feel, and its copy offers a three-tiered argument endorsing the car as the family decision that is “as wise as it is wonderful.”
Nichols is spot on when it comes to the car as “social signifier.” Her sister’s Mustang signified a very different persona than the author’s own cars, a plum-colored Honda minivan, a Honda SUV, a Volvo wagon, and a Subaru Forester. While the minivan and the SUV signaled mom cars, Nichols discovers that her Subaru Forester suggested something rather different. Beginning in the 1990s, Subaru conducted focus groups to learn more about their buyers; a significant portion of the gay community, especially lesbians, it turned out, had long been fans of the car. Subaru doubled down and began an ad campaign that directly targeted gay women with “coded words and slogans with double entendres.” (Gay men, it seems, prefer Jeep Wranglers and BMWs.) Nichols writes that she loves the Forester for many reasons—its size and fit for her build, the car’s utility for carrying sports gear, its reliability—and she relates with amusement how one day she overheard two teenage boys refer to the car as a “lesbaru.”
Nichols is not without a sense of humor but too often her tone is adamant—“I knew for a fact that the car industry single-handedly launched our never-satisfied consumerist lifestyle.” She is agitated by matters large and small: seatbelts, climate change, crash test dummies, EV charging stations, McDonald’s coffee, bullying drivers. Granted, the story of a Prius driver in Cambridge bumping her son’s bike in a fit of road rage is harrowing. And it is refreshing that Nichols isn’t oblivious to the irony of a virtue-signaling Prius driver on the streets of progressive Cambridge succumbing to one of the most dangerous passions of our motoring age. Yet virtually every aspect of the car and car culture serves as grist for authorial grievance. Cars have traumatic childhood connotations, cars represent climate change concerns, cars carry a host of stereotypes like parasitic rust patches, they are a source of parental anxiety, they exemplify all the most reprehensible aspects of modern capitalism. Big Auto is a Cause for Concern. So when Nichols describes herself as “a true car lover,” I remain less than convinced. True joy in driving is to be found in books such as Matt Crawford’s Why We Drive—from which Nichols, to her credit, quotes frequently. As Crawford observes, “To drive is to exercise one’s skill at being free, and one can’t help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel. It seems a skill worth preserving.” In her book’s finer moments, Nichols seems to agree.