Girls and the getaway: cars, culture, and the predicament of gendered space.

• Author: Sanger, Carol

Introduction

What does law tell us about our relations to material things? Property theorists maintain that there are no legal relations between persons and things.(3) Things can be owned, transferred, bequeathed, assigned, repossessed, and so on, but such arrangements really describe relationships among different persons with regard to the object rather than relationships between persons and things.

Yet the quality or shape of the legal relations among persons often depends on the cultural meaning of the thing in question, a meaning (or meanings) that exists, in some form anyway, prior to or independent of, legal concepts traditionally attached to things such as ownership or liability. Our legal relations with one another are informed by our social relations to things in that we relate to one another through (in, on, and around) things and not merely to things themselves.

What, then, is the legal significance of the social significance of things? How does the law comprehend, affect, reinforce, transform, and undermine the relations between persons and things? In this Essay I examine these questions by looking at connections between one particular thing - the automobile - and one particular group of persons - women. How it is that the automobile has come to serve women - as drivers, as passengers, as purchasers - less well than men? After all, in some sense a car is a gender neutral machine seemingly capable of taking drivers of either sex equal distances. But how long after the first one was welded together did it shed any pretense of such neutrality? How did that transformation come about and what has law made of the results?

The inquiry takes as a starting point the anthropologist's view that "things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with."(4) Indeed, for many anthropologists,

this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things.(5)

Of course, the study of things is not limited to anthropologists. Commodities and things in general "constitute a topic of lively interest to social and economic historians, to art historians, and, lest we forget, to economists, though each discipline might constitute the problem differently."(6) The same is true of legal scholars. The more sophisticated investigations of property currently focus on the distinctive relationships between persons and objects.(7)

This Essay contributes to the project by looking at how the meaning and use of the automobile has become powerfully inscribed through law. My argument is that the car has sustained and enhanced traditional understandings about women's abilities and roles in areas both public (the road) and private (the driveway). Specifically, the car has reinforced women's subordinated status in ways that make the subordination seem ordinary, even logical through two predictable, but subtle, mechanisms: by increasing women's domestic obligations and by sexualizing the relation between women and cars.

The origins of this project lie somewhere between Dinah Shore and Thelma & Louise.(8) Percolating in my subconscious has been the memory of Dinah Shore (circa 1950-something) with her bright red lips (apparent even on a black and white television) inviting me and my family to "See the USA in our Chevrolet" and reminding us, as she blew her huge farewell kiss, that "America is the Greatest Land of All." Thirty years later, the movie Thelma & Louise - which has its own share of beautiful red lips - told quite a different story about seeing "the Greatest Land of All" by car. As the two women try to drive from Oklahoma to Mexico without going through Texas, Louise explains to Thelma, "Look, you shoot off a guy's head with his pants down - believe me, Texas is not the place you want to get caught."(9)

Louise's comment may be an extreme version of a fairly common understanding among women about not "getting caught" in the wrong place while driving. Young women are regularly warned never to drive on a low tank of gas or on bad tires. Recall the generic commercial with the woman driving down a dark, rainstreaked road, windshield wipers keeping pace with her accelerating heartbeat. Aren't you glad you bought her the Sears long-life?

Yet while one of the dangers which cars present for women is that they can take us too far from home and then break down, my focus here is not on mechanical difficulties. The perils for women of driving, buying, or riding in cars are more complicated and far less easy to fix. After all, it wasn't bad brake linings that sent Thelma and Louise over the edge.

That is not to say that cars had nothing to do with their plunge. Thelma and Louise engaged in lots of questionable car-connected activities: they drove off alone, picked up a hitchhiker, defied the highway patrol, and, in a scene which for many women motorists depicted justice overdue, took on a harassing trucker and blew up his rig, nudie wheel flaps and all. Of course, Thelma and Louise paid for each of these decisions. Thelma was nearly raped in a parking lot; the hitchhiker stole their getaway money; the police, FBI, and SWAT teams of the entire Southwest apparently had no choice but to surround the two women in a dragnet from which there could be no escape. Indeed, from the moment the two women pulled away from Thelma's driveway, the movie, like their Thunderbird itself, speeds up so that Louise's final, suicidal acceleration is stunning but not unexpected.

My position here is not that driving for women equals death. Many of us drive regularly and regularly make it home. At the same time, I don't want to deny or minimize the dangers for women of driving cars, of giving people lifts, of accepting rides, of walking in parking lots, or of helping other motorists.(10) But rather than simply flag these activities as dangerous, I want to consider them within a more systematic inquiry of how cars figure into women's lives and how law contributes to the arrangement.

The case I shall develop is this: From the start, the automobile has been presented as both the symbol and the means of women's liberation. Anyone who could turn a crank, or by the 1920s just a key, could take off on her own. To a large extent, however, the exciting promise of driving, owning, or riding in a car comes to a crashing but often unmarked halt when played out in the context of women's lives. Get away, indeed! Thelma and Louise couldn't even make it to the border. What I want to think about here is why they couldn't. What assumptions do we bring to the idea of women and cars which so prepare us for the apparent inevitability of the film's final frame?

Certain subordinating connections come quickly to mind. The very phrase "women drivers" refers not to women who drive but absent-minded femmes at a loss behind the wheel of such a big machine. High school driver's-ed classes still show women drivers "as dreamy, air-headed yackers who are hopelessly ignorant about the mechanical complexities of life."(11) The use of women to sell cars is equally familiar. The tedious practice of draping women across car hoods at auto shows and the prominence of long-legged young women in car ads (now occasionally wearing very short business suits) remain successful marketing techniques.(12)

There may be nothing especially automotive about these examples. The sexual use of women in automotive advertisements (and the popularity of shop tools as common props in pornography) differs little from advertising strategies for other "male-dominant" products.(13) Similarly, making fun of women who drive cars, fly planes, or participate in other activities tagged as male comes as no surprise.

What I want to explore here is not the use of women in car culture but rather how women use cars and what culture - particularly law - has made of that. I approach the issue by considering cars in two different ways: cars as means and cars as places. I start with the car as a form of transportation. Despite the advertisers' promises of taking to the open road, for many women cars have served less as an escape from domestic duties than as a technologically enhanced form of domestic obligation. I develop this idea in Part I by looking at how suburban zoning ordinances helped rigidify gender roles, contributing to the creation of the modern chauffeur-mother, now tethered less to the hearth than to the garage.

Part II then shifts the focus from the car as a form of transportation - the means of getting us from here to there - to the car as a location - a place of private, intimate space. Many of us spend hours and hours in stationary cars: reading, working, drinking coffee in solitude, talking with, or holding hands with someone else. As David Rieff writes in Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World:

If Southern California contains a world of dream houses, none, are quite so dreamy in the end as that ultimate residence, the automobile. Was it the association of the idea of freedom . . . with that of mobility that made the American love affair with the car persist long after traffic conditions had made the actual experience of driving anything but fun? Certainly, the promise of the automobile was not transportation so much as solitude and independence . . . .(14)

But imagining the car as a place of independence and solitude for women becomes more complicated when we consider the connections between cars and sex. The car itself - long, sleek, and powerful - has long been associated with sexuality. Consider Roland Barthes's description of the arrival of the new 1958 Citroen D.S.: "In the exhibition halls, the car on show is explored with an intense, amorous studiousness...