Eat My Dust Georgine Clarsen Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Clarsen, Georgine. Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.60154. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/60154 [ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 09:03 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. EatMyDust the johns hopkins university studies in historical and political science 126th series (2008) 1. Georgine Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists [ EatMyDust{ Early Women Motorists georgine clarsen The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 246897531 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clarsen, Georgine, 1949– Eat my dust : early women motorists / Georgine Clarsen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8465-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8018-8465-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Automobile ownership—Australia—History—20th century. 2. Automobile ownership—Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. Automobile ownership—United States—History—20th century. 4. Women automobile drivers—History—20th century. 5. Women consumers—History—20th century. 6. Feminism—History—20th century. 7. Women—Social life and customs—20th century. 8. Nineteen twenties. I. Title. he5709.a6c586 2008 388.3'42082–-dc22 2007053001 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. 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To my parents, Elizabeth Jeanne Clarsen-Lesueur (1919–2003) & Bernard Jacobus Clarsen (1919–2006) This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 Movement in a Minor Key: Dilemmas of the Woman Motorist 12 2 A War Product: The British Motoring Girl and Her Garage 30 3 A Car Made by English Ladies for Others of Their Sex: The Feminist Factory and the Lady’s Car 46 4 Transcontinental Travel: The Politics of Automobile Consumption in the United States 64 5 Campaigns on Wheels: American Automobiles and a Suffrage of Consumption 86 6 “The Woman Who Does”: A Melbourne Women’s Motor Garage 104 7 Driving Australian Modernity: Conquering Australia by Car 120 8 Machines as the Measure of Women: Cape-to-Cairo by Automobile 140 Conclusion 158 Notes 169 Essay on Sources 179 Index 189 This page intentionally left blank Preface Give a Girl a Spanner is one of the forgotten slogans of 1970s feminism, and I was one of the many girls in Australia who picked up a spanner (or wrench) and be- came a motor mechanic in those years. We female apprentices firmly believed that we were the first to take up such work, a misapprehension encouraged by stories in the press that celebrated women in male trades as pioneers moving into new territory. But every now and then there were disquieting moments. I remember being puzzled by the occasional conversation with older female customers who sought me out on the workshop floor to let me know they had done similar work when they were my age. Their pleasure in the memory of the work was palpable in their warm words of encouragement—but I had no way of making sense of the information they offered. Partly, it was my youthful arrogance that led me to as- sume that my generation represented an entirely new expression of femininity, but it was also true that I had been locked out of knowledge that should have been mine. I grew up in the postwar years, quite unaware of the rich history of women’s active engagements with the mechanical arts. Not only was I ignorant of the facts of women’s mechanical aspirations and achievements in previous generations, but there was no language available to help us understand a specifically female expe- rience of technical competence or to articulate the challenges that we faced in an auto repair world that was firmly gendered male. We were only the newest genera- tion of enthusiastic female mechanics, unknowingly reinventing relationships to technology—as though no technologically confident women had gone before. It was not until two decades later, when I began interviewing women who had been motor transport drivers in the military services during World War II, that I came to understand how mistaken we had been. I found an earlier generation of women—my mother’s generation—who, like us, had eagerly seized the pleasures and opportunities that the mechanical arts offered them. And through them I dis- covered something more astonishing: there had been an even earlier cohort of me- chanical women, my grandmother’s generation, who not only had worked as trans- x preface port drivers during World War I but had opened motor garages, taxi companies, and rental car services in the interwar years. Female mechanics? Garage workers? Women’s garages in the 1920s? How could it be that I did not know this? It was startling news, which impelled me to research the forgotten history of women au- tomobilists in the decades surrounding World War I. It has taken some ten years from that small start to the publication of this book, and there are many institutions and individuals who helped bring it to comple- tion. At the University of Melbourne I was supported by an Australian Postgrad- uate Award and at the University of Adelaide by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Adelaide Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. A Fulbright Foun- dation Fellowship took me to the University of California, Berkeley, where I was an affiliate scholar at the Beatrice M. Bain Research Center for Gender Studies and a visiting fellow at the Transportation Institute. The Smithsonian Institution provided me with a postdoctoral fellowship to work in the archives of the National Museum of American History. An Australian Bicentennial Fellowship at the Men- zies Centre for Australian Studies, University of London, and an Australian Acad- emy of Humanities Traveling Fellowship supported my British research. The Ernes- tine Richter Avery Fellowship at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, and a research grant-in-aid at the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware, allowed me to continue my American research. Finally, the writing was supported by an Australian Research Council postdoc- toral fellowship at the Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University; a residency at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of Califor- nia, Santa Cruz; and a research grant by the University of Wollongong. My debt to many individuals is just as great. Patricia Grimshaw, Joy Damousi, and Anni Dugdale at the University of Melbourne helped me to formulate the very earliest versions of this project and have continued to offer help and encour- agement. As the project became more ambitious and became a transnational project, a great many other people also provided invaluable support. Susan Mag- arey at the University of Adelaide; Caren Kaplan and Martin Wachs at the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley; Roger White and Steven Lubar at the National Mu- seum of American History; Roger Horowitz at the Hagley Museum and Library; Mark Patrick at the National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Li- brary; archivists at the Benson Ford Research Center, Henry Ford Museum, Green- field Village, Michigan; librarians at the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Patricia Jalland and Judy Wajcman at the Australian Na- tional University; Carroll Pursell, now at Macquarie University; Melissa Boyde and Amanda Lawson at the University of Wollongong; and the “Modernistas” at the preface xi Australian National University—Ann Curthoys, Desley Deacon, Rosanne Kennedy, Alison Kibler, Jill Matthews, Ann McGrath, Fiona Paisley, and Angela Woolla- cott. I also offer my thanks to my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts at the Univer- sity of Wollongong for their material support and encouragement. My debt to the many people who assisted me with each of the separate research studies is recorded in the notes to each chapter. Ponch Hawkes offered me unfailing support from the beginning of the project and kindly helped me with selecting and reproducing photographs. Thanks to Be- linda Henwood for her copyediting of the manuscript and writerly advice. I have enjoyed the intellectual and personal companionship of a great many people throughout this research, including many who read early drafts of the man- uscript. Special thanks to Barbara McBane, Julie Bishop, Ian Bracegirdle, Silvia D’Aviero, Lois Ellis, Kathy Gibson, Sarah Grimes, Sara Hardy, Donna Jackson, Margaret Jacobs, Viktoria Lopatkiewicz, Julie McInnes, Richard Mohr, Barbara Nicholson, Inez Rekers-Lesueur, Kathy Robinson, Amanda Smith, and Ginette Verstraete. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as Georgine Clarsen, “‘A Fine University for Women Engineers’: A Scottish Munitions Factory in World War I,” Women’s History Review 12, no. 3 (2003): 333–56. Parts of chapter 6 were published as “‘The Woman Who Does’: A Melbourne Motor Garage Proprietor,” in Sap- phic Modernities: Sexuality, Women, and National Culture, ed. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 55–71. Parts of chapter 7 were published as “Tracing the Outline of Nation: Circling Australia by Car,” Con- tinuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13, no.