Women at the Wheel by Katherine J. Parkin

Author:Katherine J. Parkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 21. Lori and Valerie at Wrenchwomen, an all-women auto-repair shop in Washington, D.C., 1978. ©2016 JEB (Joan E. Biren).

Historically, some women found that operating a garage by and for women only gave them more confidence and removed them from the “cynical eyes” of men. In 1921, Pauline Leiner planned to open such a garage, fresh from her experience training at a YMCA automobile school. She learned that a large number of women not only drove but also gained independence and automotive skills during the First World War. She reflected, “There’s something, apparently, in the sight of a woman tinkering with an automobile that arouses what some Englishwomen would call a ‘fair old devil’ in men who seem to feel their superiority overmuch in the oil-laden atmosphere of a garage.” She feared that “a stray male helper or two, obscure in position, would surely spoil the whole effect,” so she settled on a woman-only business model that she termed an “Adam-less Eden, where there won’t be any gimlet-eyed males staring superciliously and exclaiming, ‘That ain’t th’ way you do it, ma’am.’ ” Asked if she thought there would be enough women mechanics to sustain her business, she concluded, “There are too many women, just like me, who became skilled mechanicians during the war.”66

This early account found many parallels in the second half of the century, with women ready to deploy their skills both on their own vehicles and in local garages. Not having the tools or an appropriate space to work stymied many of these mechanically minded women. However, starting in the 1970s, a growing number of garages rented stalls to do-it-yourself car mechanics who wanted to perform their own brake jobs and tuneups.67

Some women wanted to do more than just repair or care for their own cars; they wanted to make a career out of being a mechanic. Of course, the number who did so was always very small. As Lillian Borgeson observed in the 1980s in Vogue, “Only fatherhood has been more exclusively male.” Even at the height of women’s automotive training in World War II, the number of women mechanics nationally never exceeded 1 percent. One woman called her 1985 training “gruesome,” describing the male students’ hostile behavior: spitting at her feet, kicking her tools, and generally making her unwelcome. Persevering, she landed her first job in a San Francisco shop that advertised “men and women” mechanics, and she believed that being a female mechanic was a “selling point” in a city famed for its more open attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Still, even with local, federal, and corporate encouragement, the number of women working as automotive service technicians and mechanics in 2013 was 1.4 percent. Even when combined with the women making up 1.6 percent of the automotive body and related repairers, these occupations remained two of the most nontraditional jobs for women in the twenty-first century.68

Despite the odds, thousands of women developed strong mechanical skills as teenagers. The first woman to drive coast-to-coast, Alice Huyler Ramsey, “claimed that she was ‘born mechanical.

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