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Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age by Virginia Scharff

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1992.0068

1097-3729

Joseph J. Corn,

Globalization and Cultural Identity

598 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE according to the needs of the majority, but rather with a view to ‘seejing] a fair margin of profit’ ” [p. 31].) Martin presents a variety of materials—industry journals, letters, news clippings, ads, and so on—from the ample and well-organized archives of Bell Canada. Unfortunately, she often accepts at face value the claims that these sources, usuallyjournalists and industry officials, made—for example, that telephone calling “tamed” loud American voices (p. 96), that calling provided more intimate conversations (p. 158), and that novelty uses of the telephone, like listening to concerts, were widespread. Martin reserves her skepticism only for statements in the industry press or the general press (not always separable in actuality) that were derogatory of women or the working class. Also, the historical sequence of evidence occasionally does not match that of her argument. For example, Martin’s claim that a concern for the privacy of calls only emerged over the years is undercut by a journalistic complaint dated 1877 (p. 143). Despite these objections, the essential elements of Martin’s story ring true. And she has done the emerging field of telephone history a service in marshaling evidence about the early, gendered culture of telephony. Claude S. Fischer Dr. Fischer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, is published by the University of California Press. Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. By Virginia Scharff. New York: Free Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 219; illustrations, notes, index. $22.95. In her splendid first book, Virginia Scharff offers a sophisticated and cogently argued study ofwomen and the coming ofthe motor age, from the horseless carriage days through the 1920s. Scharff’s interpretation includes two major arguments. First, she believes the car “represented a new, movable field upon which women’s struggle for power and auton­ omy would be played” (p. 25). Second, she views automobiles as gen­ dered objects, as constructed in no little part from “popular assumptions about proper masculinity and femininity” (p. 65). By considering the automobile as a field of political and personal struggle, Scharff recovers a history largely ignored by male students of the automobile. She demonstrates, for example, how many women thought of and used cars as tools for group advancement—primarily in service to the suffrage cause—as well as for individual emancipa­ tion. In a number of states, suffragists effectively deployed caravans of automobiles to canvas on behalf of the vote. Olive Schultz, a TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 599 feminist from New York, even established a taxi service for women, earning a living, serving women, and advancing suffrage all at the same time. Whatever their motives for taking the wheel, by doing so women engaged in “a form of public protest” (p. 73), Scharff believes, displaying themselves in public and moving far from the hearth and home where patriarchal sentiment had traditionally anchored them. Most powerful symbolically in these steering-wheel protests were racing drivers like Joan Newton Cuneo, who won a number of events against men from 1905 to 1909, and figures like Alice Huyler Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the United States. More than ordinary operators, such women fueled the anxieties of men who worried “that mobile women would be,” as Scharff writes, “beyond control, socially, spatially, sexually” (p. 166). Scharff’s second argument, that the automobile and the automobile industry were shaped by notions of gender, especially deserves attention from readers of thisjournal. In the chapter “Femininity and the Electric Car,” she documents how manufacturers, along with male automobilejournalists such as Motor’s C. H. Claudy, “devised a kind of ‘separate spheres’ ideology about automobiles: gas cars were for men, electric cars were for women” (p. 37). Yet advice and advertising claims must not be confused with reality, she warns, for statistics reveal that only rarely did women own electric automobiles. Many women, in fact, including President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, deliberately chose large, gasoline-powered vehicles to counter the prevailing feminine stereotype. By 1920, when gasoline had virtually supplanted steam and elec­ tricity as a source of...