Machines as the measure of women: colonial irony in a Cape to Cairo automobile journey, 1930

Machines as the measure of women: colonial irony in a Cape to Cairo automobile

journey, 1930 Georgine Clarsen

Histories of transport have been notably deficient in considering women as

competent technological actors, but, in seeking to correct that elision, feminist

scholars have argued that adding women to those histories does much more

than merely expand established narratives. Instead, an analysis of womens

engagement with transport and travel offers an analytics of the power relations

that inhere within those practices and allows us to consider the standard masculinist

stories in new ways. Georgine Clarsen explores some of the intimate links between

gender, technological modernity and colonialism by focusing on white womens

transcontinental travel in Africa at the end of the 1920s, when assumptions of

British colonial and industrial superiority were being challenged and American

economic supremacy was replacing the old empires of Europe. She focuses on

a journey taken by two women who, at the height of the Great Depression,

drove an aging British car from Cape Town, through Africa and back to the

factory where it had been built. The story the women told about their trip

provides a fresh perspective on some of the disavowed anxieties that colonisers

carried with them, and depicts gender, race, class, nation and empire as performative

social categoriesshifting, unstable and thoroughly imbued with changes in

the global automobile industry at that historical moment. Key words Women

drivers, Cape to Cairo, Automobile adventure, Transcontinental motoring,

Colonialism, Car culture.