Automobiles

For over a century, men have used the activities of making, purchasing, driving, racing, and working on cars to assert and reinforce American perceptions of masculine work, consumption, skill, and technological prowess. At the same time, women and minority males have faced limits and challenges to their access to and authority over automotive technology.

Automobiles debuted in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when the ongoing processes of industrialization, bureaucratization of white-collar work, and feminization of office spaces were undermining older work-based sources of masculinity. The automobile industry played a significant part in accelerating these changes, particularly after Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line in 1913. Autoworkers, like other male industrial workers during the twentieth century, responded by asserting their masculinity through a shop-floor culture that sought control over the work process and fostered increased homosocial leisure activities such as drinking, gambling, and hunting.

As a commodity, the automobile offered early-twentieth-century American males a new form of consumption to salve the psychic wounds of modern industrialized manhood: a unique consumption of comfort, convenience, and often luxury that was also an unquestionably masculine activity conducted in an all-male retail setting. Once purchased, automobiles offered multiple avenues for exercising and expressing manly independence, freedom, and control. Automobile drivers were in complete control of their destiny, free of the limits of horse-drawn or rail transportation. Even when the machine broke down or became mired in the mud, it provided men the opportunity to display masculine traits of technical knowledge and mechanical skill as they tinkered with and, they hoped, asserted mastery over an expensive industrial product that they owned, operated, and (ideally) understood mechanically.

Women and minority men also sensed the freedom and power of automobiles, and they exploited opportunities to master the new machines. Before World War I, women drove, raced, and worked on cars in defiance of strong social pressures against such behavior. In the face of widespread racism and segregation, African-American men established their own networks of automobile clubs and auto-related businesses to facilitate black motoring. However, automakers inundated the popular print media with images that both exploited and perpetuated ideals of white men as controllers of automotive technology and women as passengers, spectators, or trophies of motorized male sexual conquest. The advent of federally funded vocational education in public schools during the 1920s established an enduring system of gender-segregated technical training that made automotive technological knowledge a rigidly masculine, and often racially segregated, terrain.

Following World War II, as suburbanization, automatic transmissions, and fatherhood domesticated automobile consumption, the now rigidly male culture of automotive technology found renewed expression in a plethora of regional and national motor-sports activities, such as drag racing, stock-car [Page 43]racing, and the annual Indianapolis 500 automobile race. Race-car drivers such as Don Garlits, Richard Petty, and A. J. Foyt provided young males with icons of masculine bravado and achievement. During the 1960s, U.S. automakers tapped into suburban male anxieties by offering a new line of muscle cars, sparking a “horsepower war” that rhetorically equated powerful piston engines with strength and virility—a design and marketing strategy that has continued into the twenty-first century.

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