Women at the Wheel

In the era of #metoo, when once again seemingly obvious acts of misogyny must be exposed and delegitimated, few of us will be surprised by the stubborn resilience of patriarchy. Even in the face of rapid social and technological change, male privilege and male violence are with us, wreaking havoc. There is no better proof of the enduring power of sexism than the way ideas about male primacy and men's right of way continue to influence American car culture. We have known for some time that the automobile came to the United States freighted with gender expectations. In Women at the Wheel, the historian of advertising Katherine J. Parkin demonstrates that despite a century of cultural transformations, the stereotype of the dim, distracted, and timid woman driver remains very much with us. Parkin offers a lively, deeply researched survey of ideas about women in the advertising and popular culture of automobiles, from the turn of the twentieth century to the second decade of the twenty-first. From the salesroom floor to the Madison Avenue suite, Parkin shows us men talking about, at, and around women, sometimes with women's assent, in the familiar language of condescension tinged with fear. Everyone, it seems, has had an opinion about women's capacity to buy, drive, and fix cars, and very few have had a good word to say. Parkin's mountain of vivid evidence ultimately begins to feel like an overabundance of protest; men have said women can't or don't or shouldn't take the wheel, hoping that they won't. Or if women must drive, men hope that they will be properly cowed and not venture too far or too fast or into places that might prove dangerous to themselves and others

Advertising · Criminology · Face (sociological concept · Media studies · Patriarchy · Political science · Power (physics · Privilege (computing · Social science · Sociology · Stereotype (UML · American Literature and Culture · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · Energy, Environment, and Transportation Policies · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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