Taking The Wheel
Peter Ling reviews a new publication on women and the motor car
- Taking The Wheel: Women And The Coming Of The Motor Age
Virginia Scharff – Macmillan, 1991 - ix + 219 pp. - £22.95
No one has taken this route before though many of the stopping points are well-known. The turn of the century saw a gender crisis that expressed itself in a challenge to conventional notions of a woman's place and a concurrent intensification of the rhetoric of masculinity. It was a time when women sought freedom and men pursued mastery, and Scharff deftly explores the beginnings of American motoring in this context.
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