Women's history has really come into its own in terms of viewing major events and developments through the perspective of women, instead of focusing on men. In Eat My Dust, Georgine Clarsen shows us how the development of the automobile affected women in the United States, England, and Australia, from the earliest days of cars to about 1930.
Clarsen doesn't limit herself to the casual woman driver who only took trips in her own area. Instead, she covers the whole spectrum of what automobiles meant to women in the early 20th century: freedom to drive themselves where they wanted to go, to learn how to maintain a car and even open businesses as mechanics, and to establish "feminist factories" for actually building cars. The book also chronicles some of the fascinating journeys made by adventurous female motorists in those early days, such as Sara Bard Field's cross-country trip to advance the cause of suffrage for American women, and Margaret Belcher and Ellen Budgell, who drove from the Cape to Cairo in Africa in a second-hand, battered car.
This is an extremely interesting book in that it provides the reader with a different perspective on the automobile age and what it meant to women as well as society as a whole. It disputes the cherished notion that men "took to" automobile technology more naturally than women did. It is also a scholarly book in that it explores the effects of the automobile on gender, class, race, and even sexuality. I found the actual stories of women involved with cars and adventure travel to be the most interesting, but the more scholarly aspects of the book do set these women in a wider context and add more substance to their stories.
This is a must-have book for anyone interested in women's history. The photographs of various women traveling or involved in mechanical work are a great addition as well. It is a fascinating look at the way that cars freed many women and started us on the path to greater "mechanical" equality with men.
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