Review of Katherine Parkin's new book, "Women at the Wheel!"

Parkin, Katherine J. Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving and Fixing Cars. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 272 pages, $34.95. ISBN – 10 0812249534, ISBN-13 978-0812249538.

Fresh new interpretations exploring the relationship between women’s lives and the automobile have followed the pioneering work of Virginia Sharff’s Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (1992), including Deborah Clarke’s Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America and now Katherine J. Parkin’s Women at the Wheel. The author, a history professor at Monmouth University, has gone beyond her previous work on food, advertising and gender roles to now examine women and their place in American car culture. In sum, she has done a remarkable job in terms of research and writing. Parkin’s mastery of the sources is noteworthy, as she has drawn on considerable archival, printed, and ephemeral material to weave an engaging and informative narrative.

Women at the Wheel is divided into five chapters: “Learning to Drive;” “Buying a Car;” “Driving a Car;” “Caring for a Car;” and “The Car and Identity.” Each of these sections highlight the author’s main contention that women had (and still have) a very different automotive experience than men, as a patriarchal society defined their role primarily as  “passengers rather than drivers.” When they did drive, they often did so to do the “domestic work expected of them.” (p. ix).

Despite its feminist orientation, this book is far from a shrill diatribe attacking male cultural dominance, however. Parkin’s prose is engaging, and her use of advertising is most effective. She concurs with Deborah Clarke in asserting that advertising has “the widest and strongest impact in shaping our awareness of cars and car culture,” and thus frequently weaves in specific advertisements with her discourse. Nevertheless, I would take issue with that interpretation, as there are experts in the advertising who argue that ads can also be reflective of cultural norms. The causal connections are far from only one way. Thus with regards to advertising shaping consumer preferences we have a sort of chicken and egg argument.

But overall, the author’s insights are well taken. And Parkin’s willingness to tackle recent history is refreshing. Who hasn’t heard a joke about women drivers and their competency, as unfair as it might be?  In the chapter entitled “Caring for a Car,” the author convincingly shows how advice was often spelled out with domestic analogies, so that the ideally cared for car was healthy, well fed and carefully maintained very much like a child. Her points about women and the licensing process, car designs as having parallels to a woman’s body, the matter of cars that resonate with women – “chic cars” -- all are important topics in automotive history.

In sum, this is a book that I will definitely use when teaching the automobile and American Life in the classroom. Personally, however, the significance of Women at the Wheel is that it has opened my eyes to the very different automotive experience that women have had. In particular I now understand far more what my wife and daughter think when driving or purchasing a motor vehicle. Whether that helps in improving the quality of my domestic life or not remains to be seen.

John Heitmann

University of Dayton