Eat My Dust - Early Women Motorists (Johns Hopkins)

Author: Georgine Clarsen: Hardbound, 196 Pages, ISBN: 9780801884658, 1st Edition, 2008

The history of the automobile would be incomplete without considering the influence of the car on the lives and careers of women in the earliest decades of the twentieth century.

Illuminating the relationship between women and cars with ease studies from across the globe, Eatly Dust challenges the received wisdom that men embraced automobile technology more naturally than did women.

Georgine Clarsen highlights the personal stories of women from the tjnited States, Britain, Australia, and colonial Africa from the early days of motoring until io3o. She notes the different ways in which these women embraced automobile technology in their national and cultural context.

As mechanics and taxi drivers—like Australian Alice Anderson and Brit Sheila O'Neil —and long-distance adventurers and political activists—like South Africans Margaret Belcher and Ellen Budgell and American suffragist Sara Bard Field—women sought to define the technology
in their own terms and according to their own needs.

They challenged traditional notions of femininity through their love of cars and proved they were articulate, confident, and mechanically savvy motorists in their own right.

More than offering new chapters in automobile history, these stories locate women motorists within twentieth-century debates about class, gender, sexuality, race, and nation.

- The Australian author, Georgine Clarsen, is a senior lecturer at the School of History and Politics at the University of Wollongong.