Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving, and Fixing Cars

Abstract

As the pace of global warming accelerates, scholars in different disciplines work together to identify climate changes in the preindustrial past. Historians and anthropologists have argued that these changes repeatedly influenced the fortunes of sprawling empires and hunter-gatherer communities alike. As this "climate history" grows in popularity and legitimacy, teachers and professors have sought to incorporate it within high school and introductory college courses. Yet many quickly found that the field's most important publications are either too technical, too dense, too narrowly focused, too expensive, or too dated for junior students. What they lacked was a slim survey that synthesized in plain language the most cutting-edge scholarship of humanity's experience with climate change throughout history.Enter Climate Change in Human History, a collaboration between Lieberman, a wide-ranging twentieth-century historian, and Gordon, a geoscientist. In just 193 pages, Lieberman and Gordon take students from the end of the great Ice Ages to the manufactured controversies that surround present-day climate change. They draw exclusively on secondary sources, although the voices of historical actors struggling with climate change in literate societies occasionally add some color.After a brief introduction that lightly touches on a selection of key concepts in climate history, the book proceeds chronologically. Its first chapter explains how climate changes on the grandest scales shaped the evolution and migration of Homo sapiens. The second chapter traces the consequences of the frigid Younger Dryas 12,000 years ago and then describes how warming set the stage for the emergence of agriculture. The chapter explains how regional and, at times, global climatic fluctuations influenced the emergence of complex societies and the heyday of the Roman and Han Empires. The fourth chapter traces the European benefits of the warm Medieval Climate Anomaly, and the complex global repercussions of precipitation changes, from antiquity to the fourteenth century. The fifth chapter focuses on decline and disaster in the cooler Little Ice Age, ending with the calamitous explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815. The sixth chapter explains how industrialization and the energy revolution freed a growing share of humanity from the constraints of climate. The seventh chapter surveys the worldwide consequences of anthropogenic global warming, and the eighth briefly describes climate models, projections, controversies, and international agreements.At its best, Climate Change in Human History provides clear, succinct, and remarkably nuanced summaries of case studies that draw from diverse, multidisciplinary scholarship. For example, its treatment of the disappearance of Norse settlements in Greenland-a classic story of collapse amid the onset of the Little Ice Age-outlines the subsistence and economic strategies of the Greenlandic Norse, describes the regional consequences of climatic cooling, surveys Norse adaptation strategies, and contrasts differen...

“Les Girls en voyage”

“…In Driving Women, Deborah Clarke asserts that when women drive, they do not run free of attachments, responsibility, or domesticity: "They do, however, significantly revise the old associations of women as home, women as place." 49 Virginia Scharff extends: "motoring women, employing the multiple possibilities of the automobile, gave new meanings to the notion of 'woman's place.'" 50 Imrie and Wallbridge note in a five-page, unpublished article, written through the eyes of their car, Hector, that when they could not find accommodation, they slept in the car, putting curtains on windows for privacy:…”

“…52 As Clarke reports, "neither fully contained nor fully mobile, women in cars call into question both domesticity and movement as empowering female tropes and, more particularly, as mutually exclusive spheres." 53 Imrie and Wallbridge also used the connections and detachments that the car and the road trip allowed for their own Ipek MehMetog lu > ANALYSIS | ANALYSE personal, financial, and professional reasons. What the professional image of the road trip gave them was a mask-camouflage hiding the fact that two queer women were travelling alone across multiple countries.…”

“…The house and the car did not confine these women; rather, they offered Imrie and Wallbridge new domestic subjectivities, and helped them to access the larger professional architectural circles. 55 In addition to an article entitled "South American Architects" published in the RAIC Journal in February 1952, Imrie and Wallbridge published four articles in the Peruvian Times journal describing the part of their road trip from Lima to Santiago. They also sent articles to American Motorist Magazine of Travel, Recreation and Adventure, published by the American Automobile Association, and to Travel Magazine, but these were rejected for reasons of unsuitability or limited space.…”