The right to drive

A recent story in the International Herald Tribune datelined Riyadh with the headline “Saudi woman arrested for driving” caught my eye and reminded me of the years that my late sister Silvia spent in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Married to a British Canadian civil engineer who accepted a job in Aramco, Silvia wasn’t allowed to drive because she was a woman. Although she was a foreigner and not a Saudi citizen, the law prohibiting women from driving applied to her, too.

The KSA is the only country that bans women from driving although, as has been pointed out by right-to-drive feminists, in Koranic times women rode donkeys. While some people in the KSA support the campaign of 32-year-old Mamal al-Sharif to grant women the right to drive, many women oppose it, arguing that raising the issue would set back efforts to gain more fundamental freedoms like voting and liberation from male guardians. Religious puritans regard the ban on women drivers as a tradition that must be upheld against the onslaught of Western ideas.

But with uprisings spreading like wildfire in the Middle East, Ms. Sharif was (no pun intended) riding the momentum and took highly publicized drives to encourage women across Saudi to join a protest movement on June 17. She helped organize Facebook and Twitter campaigns for women’s right to drive. On May 22, Ms. Sharif was arrested in Dammam and detained for five days on charges of disturbing public order and inciting public opinion by twice driving to highlight her cause.

Like other astute women throughout history, Ms. Sharif knows that driving an automobile provides opportunities for work, travel and independence. In the Western world during the Victorian Age, women were viewed as too timid and fragile to deal with public affairs or participate in strenuous activities, much less operate complex machinery like an automobile. This argument was used to deny women a higher education and the right to vote.

COURAGEOUS. But some courageous women refused to fit into the “weaker sex” mold. In June 1909, Alice H. Ramsay, 22, drove 3,800 miles from New York to San Francisco, making her the first women in history to cross America in an automobile. Oddly enough, her husband, a New Jersey congressman, never learned to drive.

Perhaps he was deterred from driving because autos at that time had to be crank-started, a difficult and often dangerous task. Charles Kettering’s invention of the self-starter in 1912 removed the necessity of crank-starting and undoubtedly encouraged more women to drive.

Incidentally, the invention of devices that make driving easier wasn’t limited to men. A woman, Mary Anderson, invented the first windshield wiper in 1902. Florence Lawrence, an actress, invented the first turn signal or “auto signaling arm” attached to the car’s rear fender. Her driving skill, evident in many of her silent movies, helped to encourage women to drive. By 1910, 5 percent of licensed drivers were women.

Women fighting for the right to vote rented cars, draped the cars with banners and criss-crossed the nation with their message. In 1916, a couple of women drove 10,700 miles in seven months, campaigning for the right to vote. In the 1920s, women educated in home economics drove across the country in Model T Fords, giving home canning demonstrations to women on farms. This was despite the fact that in the 1910s and 1920s, driving a car wasn’t as pleasant as it is today since motorists arrived at their destination with wind-blown hair and dirty faces.

WORLD WARS. But it was America’s effort in the two world wars that really got more women to drive. In 1914, during World War I, women were recruited to drive for the French and British branches of the Red Cross, including American women such as famous art patron Gertrude Stein. The overseas women were not only expected to bring their own cars, they also had to maintain them, including making minor repairs. In Europe during World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower’s driver was a young woman.

Meanwhile, in 1915 Wilma Ramsay, an expert garage mechanic, became the first woman taxi driver in New York. In 1916, the Girl Scouts initiated an “Automobiling Badge” for which girls had to demonstrate driving, auto mechanics and First Aid skills.

In 1922, three years after World War I ended, Henry Ford opened his Phoenix factory and hired women to do assembly and welding work, but only those who were single or widowed because he did not approve of married women working outside the home. Ford famously said: “I consider women only a temporary factor in industry. Their real job in life is to get married, have a home and raise a family. I pay our women the same as men so they can dress attractively and get married.”

During World War II (1939-1945), US car manufacturers stopped making cars and converted their assembly plants over to war production. Women pumped gasoline and did other jobs traditionally done by men following the motto “Do the job he left behind.” In her book, “Talk About Driving,” Heather Baker explains how two world wars shaped the events that gave women not only the incentive to drive but also a duty to their country.

However, despite all this, I still think that women cannot equal men in motorsport. Just as there are no women chess grandmasters, there are no women world champion drivers. Women do not have the brute strength and endurance to withstand all the g-forces inflicted on drivers in Formula One or the World Rally Championship or Indy 500. At Indianapolis 500, the best finish for a woman so far is third place by Danica Patrick in 2009.