Excerpts from "Women's Issues in Transportation," published in K. Lucas (ed.) Running on
Empty: Transport, Social Exclusion and Environmental Justice (London: Policy Press, 2004)
An historical perspective reveals that transportation has
been used to subjugate women historically and to the present day.
Transportation can serve as a method of securing freedom, equity and an
increase in rights and liberties to women. Examples can be seen in the
developments in the right to travel cases that gave women the right to move
from state to state in the US and to secure welfare benefits in their new
communities (see Shapiro v Thompson, 394 US 618, 1969, and subsequent US
Supreme Court cases).
Cars were marketed to women early in the development of the automobile, but these early electric cars had limited range based on the notion that women did not need to travel beyond the sphere of the home. Institutional sexism strongly relates to women's history in transportation. To this day, we are plagued by the stereotyping of, and jokes about, women drivers. Women in the sphere of transportation are also often stereotyped in culture and societal attitudes and images.
Folk, blues, and rock'nroll songs provide a telling example of a misogynist attitude toward women. Blues singer Robert Johnson generally displayed misogynist attitudes toward the women in his songs (Lemon, nd, para 2):
In songs such as Terraplane Blues, Johnson shows a misogynist attitude when he uses the sexual metaphor of a car as a woman's body. In Terraplane Blues, Johnson speaks of all the things he plans to do to this woman, even though it appears that she is not interested in doing anything with him.
Douglas Brinkley, author of Wheels for the World: A
biography of Ford Motor Company, stated in an interview on Morning Edition on 3
June 2003 (para 3):
Henry Ford was shrewd
enough to see women as the great consumers of America. If the man was
going to be working these 40 or 50 hour workweeks, that gave the woman the time
to do the shopping, to be the one who perhaps bought the Model T or the family
car, and he won a lot of women over to his product by doing that.
Similarly: Historians agree that the dominant gender
ideology in America by the mid-nineteenth century and, with increasing
ambivalence, into the early twentieth century, was that of separate
spheres. The division of the world into public and private, male and
female worlds, has created a tension for women using any means of
transportation, because transportation has traditionally taken place in a
public, male space. But ideology bent to convenience: women frequently,
if less frequently than men, used trains, streetcars, wagons, or cars, even if
their use of these means of transportation ran counter to the separate spheres
concept. (Schlanger, 1998, para 1)
In planning, where the press of work and current issues in
the profession leave little time for philosophical examinations, basic theory
gets understandably short shrift. Nonetheless, it is wise on occasion to
step back and examine the theories and ideas underlying our practice, for they
are important.
The aim of our research is not to examine the impact on
specific areas such as land-use planning, but on the conception of transportation
planning and the ways it is carried out. The challenges and contributions
of this work have many implications for planning theory, going well beyond
issues of gender and dealing with power, process, professionalism, and
ethics. These issues reach to the foundation of many issues of current
importance in planning: defining the public interest, citizen participation,
equity, justice, and the legitimation of planning itself.
Vigorous debates around feminist theories have been found in many disciplines since the 1960s. All are motivated by a shared purpose: to challenge male dominance, to contribute to knowledge about women, and to construct a science in which gender and gender relations are seen as fully social and explanatorily important. The data and documentation establishing the extent to which gender bias has permeated the humanities and sciences and the impact this has had is now extensive and widely accepted. There is no single "feminist theory." There are many areas of divergence and disagreement between Marxist feminists, radical feminists, women of color, materialists, idealists, postmodernists, and others. Despite the many differences between and within disciplines, there is a consensus (Snyder, 1995, p 92) on certain central ideas which have direct implications for research and practice:
> Social experience is gendered. That is, the social order creates, assigns, and influences our roles, values, opportunities, status, environments, and perspectives in part based on gender. Gender itself is a social construct distinct from the biological category of sex.
> All theory, like all practice, is inherently political; it necessarily either perpetuates or challenges the status quo. The development of knowledge and its application through action are social enterprises, and therefore have political and ethical aspects which cannot be disassociated from them.
> Theory and practice cannot and should not be separated. Feminist theory is explicitly emancipatory and critical. Most theorists believe that knowledge contains an imperative to action; theory and praxis are seen in a mutually reinforcing, reflexive relationship.
> Subjects and objects are not and cannot be separated. A relationship exists between knower and the object, and each necessarily affects the other. Theory and practice are more accurate and clear when this reflexivity is consciously accepted, rather than attempting the scientistic ideal of objectivity through separation. A corollary of the above is that personal experience and grounded research are valid forms of knowledge. Feminist thought directs attention to and admits a broader range of experience as legitimate and valid knowledge. Other forms of knowing and other knowers exist beyond the limited authorities and expert status granted by traditional scientific method and the dominant patriarchal culture.
US transportation studies clearly demonstrate significant differences in women's travel behavior, patterns and needs from those of men (see Chapter Two of this volume). For example, women drive less (21 to 38 miles per day); men drive longer (67 to 44 minutes per day) (US Department of Transportation, National Household Travel Survey, 2001-02). Other differences include variations in trip-chaining travel patterns for working women with children, increased isolation for older women who live in suburban and rural communities and who no longer drive, transportation safety and security concerns of women, and numerous other issues. There are also variations among groups of women, using criteria such as disability, age, race, national origin, limited English proficiency, income, and family status. Many of these differences require a focused policy and practice response.
The Federal Highway Administration (Hanlon, 1997, p 651)
finds:
Differences between men
and women in terms of the ways in which they use public transport have been
well-documented. Increasingly, the typical public transport user is not only a
woman, but also a captive customer being without access to a car or without a
license. In fact, two thirds of all public transport trips are made by
such captive customers.