Modern women on modern machines: cultural constructions of women motorists in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain

With Peter Merriman, Aberystwyth University.

Part of the Cultural and Historical Seminar Series.

Please contact sue.davis@nottingham.ac.uk for the link to the event.

In this paper, I examine how female motorists were figured by male and female writers, journalists, and cultural and political commentators in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Drawing upon published writings in the specialist motoring press and other literatures from the time, I analyse discussions of the embodied practices of motoring which in part focussed on whether motoring and particularly driving were feminine pursuits or not.

I examine how female motorists were positioned as modern and liberated ‘suffragette types’, and I examine the role of women’s motoring columns as spaces for women’s expression and for framing female consumption, while also reinforcing traditional gender divisions and roles. I outline the importance of the new spaces of London’s West-End (especially clubs and specialist shops) as spaces of consumption for female motorists, and I discuss the role of female celebrity racing drivers such as Dorothy Levitt in publicising the achievements and struggle of women drivers.

Finally, I examine how certain types of car such as the light car and voiturette were presented as suitable for women motorists, reinforcing distinctions and divisions between masculine and feminine bodies, practices, technologies and spaces.