Women Behind The Wheel: The History of Cars You Didn't Know

March Author Interview with Nancy Nichols

In her remarkably informative memoir, Women Behind The Wheel: An Unexpected and Personal History of the Car, Nancy Nichols takes us on the drive of her life, shaped and influenced by the automobile. This is a story we expect to read by men, after all, cars are their domain, right?

Nichols provides a persuasive argument that cars are not a man’s-only interest; cars have played a major role in women’s history and domestic life today. Cars freed women with the ability to drive long distances on their own and seek romantic excursions with men. But cars also further chained women to the homes, with minivans and “Soccer Mom” cars marketed towards mothers to haul around children, groceries, sports gear, and more, some even equipped with vacuums—a mobile home environment for accommodating the lives and needs of others and, of course, to keep clean.

As Nichols delves into her personal experiences of growing up with a father who was a used car salesman, a drag racing brother, and a mother and sister whose cars were extensions of their own personal style, she also informs of us the history of the car that changed the way average American families like hers live. Cars enhanced the Suffrage movement, and challenged traditional gender roles—hence the inception of the “woman driver” trope we all still know and endure today.

If you think car and driving culture doesn’t have a rich and compelling history, Nichols’s book will not only inform you, but will make you think differently about all the places you go and how you get there. Buy your copy here today!

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Rachael W: You have an extensive list of sources, some of which I’ve read (thanks to your recommendation.) Tell me about your research process, how you came across these authors and titles. Did you start with burning questions you’ve always wanted to get to the bottom of, like, where did the women-driver stereotype originate? Or was the impetus a more generic, “let’s see what we can find out?”

Nancy N: Both.  I have always wondered where the bad driver stereotype originated. And it took me a long time to realize that cars in the beginning were very hard to drive and to start.  They had hand cranks and there was no such thing as power steering.  It just makes sense that they would be difficult for women to drive. They were also difficult for men. But the idea that women were bad drivers stuck.

I didn’t know as much at all about all the important cultural research around women and the car until I started digging into the book more.  I read Virginia Scharff’s, Taking the Wheel, first.  Then I followed on with a lot more research.  I like to read a book or an article and then find the best bits and figure out where they came from in the footnotes. From there I find and read the original source.  It takes a lot of time, but I enjoy it.

RW: You’ve received a lot of positive attention on this book so far. Congrats on the glowing review in NYT Books. I find the memoir parts of the book interesting and compelling, but I also believe that memoir—creative non-fiction in general—has a lot of elasticity. A memoir isn’t like a novel, where there’s a set format of components that should be included. And for a car enthusiast, such as myself, the history was essential. But I wonder what would you might say to a reader who asks for more memoir and less car?

NN: Braided nonfiction narratives must walk a fine line between the personal and the larger story at hand.  You can’t please everyone.  You must do the best you can and be in service to the book you are writing. The material itself will tell you what it wants to become.  I know that sounds a little vague, but I try to work with the material at hand and just sit with it.  I do believe that it will tell me what it wants to become.  Nonfiction is not like fiction.  There really are only so many routes to tying together the facts at hand.  I can’t just make up whole chapters or scenes.

RW: Sadly, both of your parents passed before you wrote this book, or at least before it was published. It seems that the one question every student of memoir wants to know is how to write about people who might be offended by what you say. How do you think this book would’ve been different, if at all, if your parents were around to read it today?

NN: I have always written about family members long after the relevant events. My mother died when I was 10 and my father passed many years ago. I don’t know what they would think of my book.  I only have one member of my extended family living who even remembers my birth family.  But I did pass the manuscript by my son and my husband for approval before publishing.  For students of memoir who are new to writing, I would say that they need to make conscious and careful choices.  It is possible to create very bad rifts in your relationships with your published work.  It’s a very personal choice to do that. And you must believe it is worth it.

RW: In chapter one, “Birth of a Used Car Salesman,” you tell us about your father, who sold “more Dodge Darts than any other man in the state of Illinois.” Readers can deduce that you were drawn to cars because of your parents, but what do you think explains your father’s decision to work in the automotive industry, and to not only sell cars, but collect and sell parts, too?

NN: I try to do justice to my father’s story in this book.  I think he was traumatized by his little brother’s death in a car accident when they were both young.  Was he trying to work something out by selling cars? I don’t know, but I suspect so. We will never know for sure. I have a lot of sympathy for both my parents.  I think they did the best they could with the situation they were in.  That’s all anyone can do.  But I can’t really understand all their decisions.  I try to make this clear by using the vehicles they drove as examples.  My mother drove a convertible and we lived in Northern Illinois.  It was just unpractical in the extreme, but in some way she was also. So those cars were important clues for me as I tried to understand my family members long after they had passed.

RW: For readers who haven’t yet had the privilege of reading your book, can you tell us about your background, particularly in writing? How did you know you wanted to be a writer? What do you like to write outside of professional work? Are you a novelist, too?

NN: I worked in television at the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and in print as a senior editor at The Harvard Business Review.  I’ve published a lot over my 40 years in the business.  I am currently working on my first novel. It’s like starting all over and being a beginner again. So much fun.

RW: From what I can glean, you do not have a social media presence, which is a pretty brave position in today’s economy. In what ways have you found success in promoting this and other books without using social media? Does your publisher think you should be on a platform?

NN: I’ve gone a very traditional route with publicity for this book.  I was delighted to get reviewed in The New York Times book review and to have been a guest on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. My publicist at Pegasus, Nicole Maher, has been amazing.  I think my publisher is happy with the attention the book is getting. I know I am.

RW: I always want to know a writer’s process. The research notwithstanding, it does seem that you prepared for this book and did a lot of planning. You were inspired by your father’s career, your brother’s racing, the way cars were an extension of your mother’s and sister’s personal style. How long did you percolate on this story before committing to writing a memoir? How did the story come to you? Do you outline? How do you revise? Do you write and revise each chapter at a time, or do you wait until the manuscript is completed before you go back through?

NN: I originally was writing a more traditional memoir.  I was able to publish a part of that in True Story, a publication of Creative Nonfiction.  At that time, I was told by my previous agent and editor it wouldn’t work as a book and that I couldn’t sell it.  Then I found a new agent, Reiko Davis of DiFiore & Company, who brilliantly helped me reformat the book into the current narrative nonfiction structure. Jessica Case at Pegasus Book was brave enough to accept the book on proposal and really get behind it. So, it was a long road.  I write and rewrite in one long document.  Gets kind of messy, but I finally work it out.

RW: What do you drive today and what would you drive as a second car if money/practicality/etc. were no object?

NN: I still drive a Subaru Forester—the one I wrote about in the book.  Very practical. If money was no object, I might like a Mercedes G Wagon or an S Class.  If I could have a collector’s car—the 1955 Dodge La Femme. It was made essentially to appeal to women buyers. It was very pink and had a built-in handbag. There is no limit to the number of cars I would like to own.  I would like to have a project car and do a custom renovation. But honestly, that won’t be happening on the current budget.

1955 Dodge LaFemme courtesy Wikipedia

RW: In your chapter “My Mother’s Chevy Convertible and Sexual Freedom,” and later in “Automotive Maternity and the Volvo,” you discuss how the car changed history for romance and motherhood in both good and bad ways. Regarding a controversial Volvo advertisement, you write, “The ad also reinforced long-standing beliefs about automotive culture: that women favored safety over speed and performance, that women prized utility in cars rather than pizzazz, and that the interior of the car was itself womblike, a special domestic space that women were responsible for keeping clean." I don’t think there’s a world in which we don’t end up with cars or some kind of equivalent, but how do you think the world would look today if we still didn’t have cars to make out in as teenagers, or schlep our kids’ hockey sticks to practice? Do you think that the car has made our culture more progressive? Do you think it’s true that women, in general truly do prize safety and utility over performance and pizazz? Why is this a binary choice, do you think?

NN: I don’t see a world without cars or some sort of personal mobility tool that looks very much like a car. I think the car is a mixed bag.  It has meant more freedom for women, but it has come at a high price.  I don’t think women value safety more than men, but I do think women are less likely to be looking for speed in their daily driver.   There really is some truth to the fact that “speed kills.” The faster you are going the more likely you are to be hurt or killed and the chances of being hurt or killed grow much greater as your speed increases. In that way, I think the choice may be binary…in the sense that it is embedded in the unchangeable physics of heavy objects at high speed.

RW: I love the contradiction that you made so glaringly clear about cars and women: on the one hand they are machines of power and freedom and on the other, they are tools of domesticity and responsibility. In your chapter, “The Punch Buggy: The Volkswagen Beetle and Violence against Women," you write, “Learning to drive was not only a personal milestone, it was also a boon for the rest of the family. Now that I could run errands and do the shopping, I was like every other woman driver. In the broad swath of automotive history, one thing has proven true: for men the car has always symbolized adventure and escapism, but for women the car likely means a longer to-do list. More chores mean more miles.” It is sort of insidious how the auto industry made cars an essential way of life for women and then ostracizes them when they drive. 

NN: As someone with some experience in the industry you will understand the old rule of thumb:  Women will buy a man’s car, but men won’t buy a woman’s car.  So, the auto industry was faced with appealing to women without damaging their model’s appeal to men.  That meant creating a kind of “domesticized” version of the auto for women. Cars for women were about being in service to others; cars for men have been more about romance of the open road.  That’s how the car industry sold the “two-car” family idea.  It worked economically and it played into already prevalent ideas about gender.  There is even an ad that appealed to men.  It said in short, buy her a car so she can do all the annoying things she wants you to do on the weekend. 

RW: In your chapter, “Back to the Future in the Electric ‘Ladies’ Car,” you write, “All of which [concerns about electric cars] is more or less true, and yet to raise these concerns is to be accused of being a technophobe, or in the words of a Twitter mob, spreading FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” In the next chapter, “Tomorrow’s Vehicle: Autonomous, Connected, Distracting, and Dangerous,” you provide a very balanced, and unafraid critique of the future of the vehicle.  In doing so, you’ve challenged the future of the car. What would you say if a reader accused you of being a technophobe? 

NN: Women’s concerns about the car have been denigrated and denied almost since the inception of the cars, so part of what I am advocating for is letting women have a bigger voice in car culture.  That’s the first thing. Second, to the extent that your readers are interested in this, I would suggest reading Matthew B. Crawford’s Why We Drive.  He had the best argument for why we need to be careful about the selling of the future.  Once something gets branded as the next best thing you can look like a fuddy duddy for not adopting it.  But aren’t there a lot of us who wish our phones had never been invented? We love them and loathe them.  All I am asking is that we spend some time thinking about the car of the future, so that we make the best possible choices going forward.

RW: What do you hope readers walk away with after reading Women Behind the Wheel?

NN: I’ve always wanted people to pay attention.  Ever since I started reporting in my early 20s, I had this naïve view that the problems of the world could be solved if we just paid attention.  I think that with the car we’ve grown so accustomed to accommodating it and its needs and forgotten so much of car history that we’ve in some sense become unaware of the auto even as it zooms all around us.  Henry James said he wanted his readers to be finely aware, so as to be richly responsible.  That seems like a good goal to me.

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