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Travel Patterns as
a Gendered Phenomenon
by
Martin WACHS
Metropolitan areas have been shaped by transportation systems, and daily
life is structured by access and travel. There is a registered motor
vehicle for every 1.3 people in the United States, and the average
American household has twice as many automobiles as it has children
under the age of twenty. Families order their daily lives on the basis
of' their carpools, business trips, or the time at which they must pick
up grandma at the doctor's office. Cars are as much a part of our
identity as homes and careers. They are, in fact, the critical link
between our homes, jobs, and social lives. Marriages are proposed in
cars, and children conceived in them. A parent tells a child about his
or her birth by relating the story of a hurried trip to the hospital in
a snowstorm, and the end of life is marked by the solemn ride to the
cemetery.
It is surprising, then, that scholars have paid so little attention to
the relationship between autos and gender. Since Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique millions of
pages have been written about the way gender has structured social
relationships in the home, workplace, politics, education, and religious
institutions, but very little has been said about gender differences in
travel, despite the fact that mobility and travel are essential to
fulfilling every role we play.
Looking closely, we begin to see that the automobile is one of the most
clearly 'gendered' aspects of American urban life. Throughout the auto's
hundred year history, women have experienced the relationship between
the car and the city differently than have men and the differences
remain surprisingly persistent. The National Personal Travel Survey
(NPTS) of 1983 showed, for example, that the average male licensed
driver drove 13,962 miles per year while the average female driver drove
only 6,381 miles per year. Genevieve Giuliano examined many data sets
from regional transportation studies and found that women traveled in
total much less than men in most American cities, yet they used public
transit more." Geographers Hanson and Johnston reported that
working women, depending upon the city under study, make journeys to
work which vary from half to two-thirds the length of the average man's
journey to work. And even casual observation makes it clear that when
men and women travel together in cars, the man is far more likely to be
the driver while the woman is in all probability in the passenger's
seat.
I believe that urban planners and policymakers have generally
misunderstood the differences between men's and women's travel patterns,
and have failed to grasp what those differences signify. It frequently
has been suggested that the huge differences in travel between men and
women will soon decrease or completely disappear because women are
entering the labor force in larger numbers than ever before. When
equality is achieved in employment, it is said, female travel patterns
will more closely resemble male patterns. I do not believe that this is
so, and my position is derived from an historical analysis of urban form
and travel. The city was deliberately structured to place men and women
in separate spheres, and as the city adjusts over time to the universal
mobility provided by the automobile, it is doing so In a social
environment which insures the continued existence of those separate
spheres.
More than seventy. percent of American men over the age of seventy are
licensed to drive, while only thirty percent of women over seventy hold
licenses. This huge difference is a residual of differences in access to
autos fifty years ago, and is clearly changing rapidly. More than ninety
percent of both men and women between the ages of twenty and fifty are
licensed to drive, and there is essentially no difference in licensing
rates by gender among young and middle-aged Americans. This is used as
evidence to indicate that gender will soon cease to be a factor
affecting driving patterns, but that evidence is incomplete. Younger
women, for example, though licensed in equal proportions to younger men,
travel for different purposes, and drive different distances. Sandra
Rosenbloom has shown that women continue to make most shopping trips and
family business trips and men travel more for work and recreational
purposes, even in households in which both spouses work. I believe that
these patterns have deep historical roots, and that the form taken by
the twentieth century city reflects the gender division of space to at
least as great an extent that it reflects efforts to conquer space
through improved mobility. If this is so, then women's increasing use of
the automobile can continue to involve a pattern of social relationships
based on gender to a greater extent than they are based on mobility.
Historical Roots of
Gendered Travel
For most of recorded history, a majority of people worked at home. Most
households produced food, shelter, and clothing under their own roofs,
and merchants, blacksmiths, crafts people, and others who offered
services for sale did so at their homes. This was true in the United
States until well into the nineteenth century. It began to change slowly
as capitalism matured and the industrial revolution gained momentum.
Factories reached sufficiently large scale that they required more
workers than could be provided within a household, and needed separate
buildings and special locations, for example, providing access to
waterways and railroad lines.
BY 1850, a substantial proportion of the population -- but still a
minority -- worked outside of the home. Virtually all of those workers
were men and most walked to work. The first metropolitan transit
services, horse drawn omnibuses, began in the 1830s through 1850s,
reflecting increases In travel to and from work, and for economic
transactions during the work day. The availability of the first public
transit services made it possible to consciously separate home and workp
place in space, and it is clear that the separation which took place was
based on ideological commitments which were genderbased.
In the United States, during the last century, men and women pursued
what historians have come to call 'separate spheres.' Man's arena was
economic production and public life (politics and scholarship) and
woman's sphere was the care of children, the nurturing of husband, the
comfort and tranquility of home, and the moral guardianship of the
family. Feminist scholar Aileen Kraditor called this 'the cult of
domesticity,' and Barbara Welter labeled it 'the cult of true
womanhood,' and it led to the cultural and social definition of women's
work and women's roles which were separate from men's, taking place at
different times and different places. BY the second half of the
nineteenth century, home had become more than an economic unit of
production. It slowly became a symbol of the ideal of goodness and
morality, and it provided material comfort and status. Above all, the
home had become the domain of women to a far greater extent than of men.
The technological advances in urban transportation which took place in
the second half of the eighteenth century, from horse cars on rails to
electric cable cars and streetcars, suburban railway systems, and
finally the automobile, all made it possible for the workplace to be
located at ever increasing distances from the home. But it is important
to remember that these technological advances took place in a culture
which was dominated by the growing separation of men's and women's
spheres. Men's workplaces and homes could be located apart because of
advances in transport technology, while the of residential suburbs
removed from the business quarters of cities resulted from the cultural
norm of separating man's economic sphere from woman's domestic sphere.
And the rapid spread of low density, single-family suburbs, which is
often cited as a result of transportation technology, was equally a
result of widespread preference for the separation of the economic
sphere from the domestic sphere. This is clear, for example, in Charles
Horton Cooley's explanation of the social role of public transportation
in American life, which he wrote in 1884:
Humanity demands that men have sunlight, fresh air, grass, and trees. It
demands these things for the man himself and still more earnestly for
his wife and children. On the other hand, industrial conditions require
concentration. It is the office of urban transportation to reconcile
these conflicting requirements; in so far as it is efficient it enables
men to work in aggregates and Yet to live in decent isolation. The
greater its efficiency in speed, cheapness, and convenience, the greater
the area over which a given industrial population may be spread."
As this quotation illustrates, Americans aspired a hundred years ago to
lower densities and larger individual homes, which were designed largely
to be women's domain, Streetcar suburbs, of low density, single-family
homes, were built in most urban areas well before the arrival of the
automobile, but they were available to only a small proportion of the
population who could afford them. Those who used public transit had to
pay roughly twenty percent of their average daily wage in fares. Thus,
only the rich could live in the suburbs and commute by transit, while
most people remained in the inner cities and walked to work. This
remained the case as urban densities increased precipitously around the
turn of the century, with the flood of migration from Europe. By 1910
population density on the east side of Manhattan reached 900 people per
acre, and was growing by 40% per decade. In Pittsburgh, steel workers
lived in crowded tenements in the shadow of the mills because they could
afford neither elegant single-family suburban housing nor the cost of
commuting.
Social reformers saw high density urban living as the source of disease
and maladjustment, and progressives called for suburbanization and the
lowering of transit fares to permit it. Their distinctions between
suburb and city perpetuated the notion of separate spheres, for they
identified the crowded inner city with masculine images of commerce and
vice; while describing residential suburbs in terms associated with
feminine virtues of domesticity. Feminists and settlement workers joined
with real estate developers in calling for lower density, and greater
separation of home and workplace, and that meant more transit lines and
lower flat fares. Mrs. V. G. Simkhovitch, for example, a New York
settlement house worker who was the only woman to address the first
National Conference on City Planning in Washington, D.C., in 1909,
joined with male speakers in advocating lowering of transit fares,
universal free transfers, and the construction of low density
residential suburbs as the solution to the urban crisis." The new
subway in New York was designed to operate with the flat fare and free
transfers which still exist, in order to promote suburbanization and
lower densities by separating man's sphere from woman's sphere in space
as well as function.
Women and the, Early
Automobile
The automobile appeared before the new transit systems were fully built,
bringing with it an enormous variety of social changes. As is well
known, the auto was for a time the play-thing of the rich, and while at
first one's class determined one's access to the auto, gender did so to
a far lesser extent. Autos fit most naturally? in low density, spacious
surroundings, and that meant the suburbs which were women's domain
during most of the work week. The unconventional Mrs. August Belmont,
who had already shocked society by marrying a Vanderbilt before that
family was considered socially eligible, and by divorcing him when
divorce was unheard of, also blazed the trail by appearing in public at
the wheel of her new car in 1897. Later, she financially supported the
National Woman's Party, one of several groups which used automobiles
extensively in campaigns for women's rights and suffrage. Suffragists
held auto parties in town squares, at which speakers would arrive in
automobiles draped with banners, carrying mobile podiums and literature
to distribute to the assembled audiences. In 1912, the pugnacious and
portly Mrs. Belmont made national headlines by leading a 'monster
parade' down Fifth Avenue in support of the feminist cause, and she did
so at the front of an impressive 'automobile contingent."
Before the turn of the century and until the First World War, there
were, women's auto races and automobile gymkhanas. Many books were
published recounting crosscountry automobile adventure trips by women,
including one by Emily Post who was accompanied by her son. On January
2, 1900, Florence E. Woods, at the age of seventeen, merited front page
headlines as she became the first woman to drive her automobile through
New York's Central Park. There is ample evidence that women could crank
start a car, replace flat tires, and disassemble carburetors as
effectively as men. In her 1908 book about motoring, for example, Hilda
Ward describes in detail how she patched tires, fixed fuel leaks, and
corrected the functioning of cylinders which were misfiring.
Similarly, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, while herself motoring
across Europe with a female companion, wrote to her father, Aimanzo,
giving him detailed instructions on what he should do to clear clogged
fuel lines, including blowing into them and using the tire pump should
exhaling fail. She joked about how mechanically inept her father seemed
to be while the technical details of auto maintenance came so easily to
her.
Society women before 1910 drove for recreation quite as freely as
wealthy men, and were called 'cheauffueses,' but effects of the doctrine
of separate spheres was evident in their travel patterns. Women drove
downtown more rarely than men. Typically, they staved within their
suburban communities, driving to social events, shops, and school
functions. And, as Virginia Scharff has shown, the electric automobile
was clearly marketed in recognition that woman's sphere gave rise to
different automotive needs and patterns of use than did man's.
National Adoption of the
Automobile
The first three decades of this century saw enormous political,
economic, and social change, and the automobile was emerging in the
midst of that change at an almost unbelievable pace. While it was still
a phenomenon which turned heads in 1900, by 1910 there was one auto for
every 265 people in the United States. As mass production lowered the
price of the automobile in relation to income, by 1917 the ratio stood
at one car for every 22 people, and in 1919 it was reported to be one
per sixteen people. The proportion of our population engaged in
manufacturing, servicing, selling, and insuring automobiles had grown so
large, that the general prosperity which encouraged auto ownership was
in large part explained on the basis of the growth of the automobile
industry itself. By 1929, with new car financing on a credit basis quite
universal, we had one car for every six men, women and children in the
country, ownership extended to middle- and even lower-class families,
and we could almost literally accommodate the entire population had it
wished to take to the roads at once. BY now, as one author put it, 'A
new car means more to the clerk in the chain grocery store, who never
owned one before, than it means to the president of the company whose
garages have housed a dozen for years."
As auto ownership grew by leaps and bounds, inner city population
densities declined, and suburbs grew in every metropolitan area. In
response, transit use increased for work trips but declined dramatically
for recreational and social trips, which were increasingly the domain of
the automobile.
The enormous growth of the automobile industry in the first part of the
twentieth century was the most important factor in the prosperity of the
twenties, yet economists and businessmen began to worry about the
future. With the number of automobiles approaching the number of
families in the United States, industry spokesmen and social
commentators wondered aloud whether or not we were approaching
'saturation,' and whether that meant that the future demand for
replacement automobiles would be much lower than the annual demand for
'first cars' which had fulied the early growth of the industry. If so,
would manufacturers be left with idle capacity in the coming years, and
the economic growth of the country be impaired? The answer came as a
conscious and vigorous effort by the industry to promote the ownership
of more than one car per family, and the advertising of the twenties
clearly indicates that the second car was marketed to households whose
first car was largely man's domain, but whose second car would be used
mostly by the woman of the house.
Gender Stereotyping and the Auto in the Twenties
Given that the auto industry had decided to market cars to a growth
market consisting primarily of women, it is interesting to examine the
manner in which it both presented women and attempted to appeal to them.
After all, during the First World War women had entered the workforce in
unprecedented numbers, and in 1920 they had won the right to vote.
American women had gone to Europe to aid in the war effort by serving as
ambulance drivers, and had freed men for military service by working as
truck and bus drivers at home. The image of the 'flapper' was dominating
the media, as girls bobbed their hair, wore short skirts, and were seen
drinking and smoking in public. The twenties are often described as a
time of increasing female independence and assertiveness, and the
automobile could be seen as a machine which could liberate women from
their traditional roles and help break down the barriers between the
separate spheres of gender.
But, the established values were also very strong, and the flapper was
more a counter-culture image than she was the typical housewife of the
period. Indeed, opinion leaders seemed to have a greater need than ever
to reinforce the traditional roles of women against the threats of
change. They spoke out against the declining importance of family and
home, and transformed the very meaning of the liberation of women from a
change in their roles to rather a release from drudgery by applying
technology to the reinforcement of their traditional roles.
Feminist scholars have shown that the introduction into the home of such
technological devices as electric washing machines and dryers, vacuum
cleaners, and electric and gas ovens and ranges resulted for most women
in little or no decline in domestic responsibilities or even the time
spent in household work. Households invested capital in acquiring these
machines, and became used to clothes more frequently laundered, rooms
more thoroughly cleaned, and meals more elegantly prepared, as women's
chores became more mechanized but no less demanding. Such was the case
with the automobile, which permitted women to expand their domestic
sphere to a much greater extent than it ever permitted them to abandon
it.
Barbara Peterson, for example, describes the emergence of the modern
woman in the twenties in these terms:
The decade of the 192Os wanted its women soft and pliant and condoned
aggressiveness only in sex and sports ... In the era which glorified
that 'the business of America is business,' every woman was told through
the media and advertising that she was entitled to an automobile, radio,
washing machine, vacuum cleaner and a 'total electric kitchen.' This was
to be her true liberation; with her new leisure she could be a better
mother and more beautiful wife.
It is not surprising that in a world of jazz, rouge, and short skirts,
women were deliberately portrayed in extremely traditional roles by
those writing the ad copy for the automobile industry. A General Motors
advertisement of the twenties, typical of hundreds of ads placed in
magazines and newspapers, shows a middle-class woman picking flowers
with her children; their car is visible in the background.
The text reads:
'When I was a child it was easy for mothers to keep in touch with their
children,' says a woman in Illinois. 'Today the members of the family
must make a real effort to keep united. I thought a great deal about
this as my children began to grow up. I decided that the most important
thing I could possibly do would be to plan ways in which they and I
could have good times together. My husband agreed, and for that reason
we bought a second automobile, since he had to use his car in getting
back- and forth to business. I can't begin to tell you of the happiness
it has given us picnics together, expeditions for wild flowers in the
spring, and exploration parties to spots of historic interest. It's our
very best investment. It has helped the children and me to keep on being
pals' . . . Every year thousands of families decide that a second car is
a saver of time, a great contribution to family happiness and health . .
."
The text suggests that traditional roles may be harder to achieve than
in the past, but it glorifies them and recommends an automobile as the
path to their attainment. In a long series of advertisements which ran
throughout the twenties, the Chevrolet was portrayed in each using a
different appeal to the traditional feminine role model. One
advertisement, entitled 'Where Town and Country Meet,' states that a
Chevrolet enables the city housewife to buy eggs, vegetables, poultry
and small fruits, direct from the farmer's wife fresh and cheap."'
Another ad, entitled 'Shop With a Chevrolet,' begins with the words:
'Chevrolet Utility Coupe is proving a wonderful help to many
housekeepers, more than paying its low cost of upkeep through economics
of time and money saved in cash and carry shopping. Another ad in the
series is entitled 'See the Children Safely to School,' and starts with
the text: 'Why worry about the safety of your little ones on the
highways or crossing city streets on the way to school, while a similar
ad is entitled 'Motor to Church in Comfort.
In response to threats of new economic, social and political freedom for
women during the twenties, the automobile increasingly became a means by
which woman's sphere of home and family was reinforced. Women's
opportunities to use the automobile became more and more limited through
symbolism and social convention as their actual physical access to the
auto increased.
The popular literature of the twenties began to present exaggerated
descriptions of women's world as compared with men's, and the automobile
constituted a central part of the imagery. In a widely quoted treatise,
The Suburban Trend., Harlan Paul Douglass advocated that
decentralization and suburbanization continue as the solution to urban
ills, though he was well aware of the extent to which suburban life
differentially affected men and women. He noted, for example, that in
several suburbs where commuters were surveyed women constituted only
between eight and fifteen percent of the commuters to the central city.
He described women's role as driving their husbands to and from the
training stations, driving children to school, and driving to shopping
locations.
While women who drove in the first decades of the century were assumed
to have at least some interest in the mechanical properties of
automobiles, during the twenties the mechanical traits of cars came to
be more associated with man's domain. Women were increasingly important
as a market for automobiles, but it was asserted that they had little
interest in the engines, brakes, or tires, and instead were devoted to
the properties of cars which were more associated with feminine roles:
color, styling, upholstery, comfort. An article in Automobile Topics, a
trade journal read by auto dealers, for example, stated that 'One of the
first things a woman thinks of when the purchase of a new car is
considered, is whether the color of the upholstering will harmonize with
her personality, coloring, and clothes.' The article goes on to state
that if she thinks the car will not complement her looks, the salesman
'might as well try to sell his cars to an Eskimo.
In a popular book on consumers, Walter Pitkin reported on a study which
showed that in 1929 men were the principal buyers of 59 percent of the
automobiles sold, while women had become the principal buyers of 41
percent of all new cars. Despite women's increasing influence on car
purchases, in a section entitled 'Woman, The Economic Imbecile,' he
quotes Alice Hamilton's column from the New York World Telegram, to
describe how women go about selecting automobiles:
When a woman views a motor car and looks as if she were pondering
weighty matters the automobile dealer grows elated. 'Ah,' he thinks,
'she is considering our wonderful new floating power. She is enchanted
by our full pressure engine lubrication.
That puzzled look is
deceptive. She is not thinking of freewheeling, of automatic clutches,
She is wondering if the car is sufficiently impressive to serve as a
frame for her as she sits, viewed through the glass by passing admiring
multitudes. She considers how her foot, ankle, and calf will look as she
steps smartly down upon the running board ... Does this fawn gray
upholstery go with most of her clothes?...
As the lines between men's and women's roles regarding the automobile
were drawn increasingly sharply 'In the twenties to limit woman's place,
the stereotype of the woman driver as indecisive, erratic, and unsafe,
became ever more common. Michael Berger, for example, quotes one writer
who stated in the New Statesman in 1927 that women:
... do not very commonly possess the nervous imperturbability which is
essential to good driving. They seem always to be a little
self-conscious on the road, a little doubtful about their own powers.
They are too easily worried, too uncertain of their own right of way,
too apt to let their emotions affect their manipulation of the steering
wheel."
Women's domestic roles are frequently described in the literature of the
twenties as more suited to their temperament and motor abilities than
such mechanical tasks as driving a car. Walter Pitkin, for example,
states that women differ from men in motor ability, primarily in that
'boys and men on the average greatly exceed women and girls in the
ability to manipulate mechanical contrivances,' and as a consequence,
'women shrink from acting when facing a crisis,' 'work by fits and
starts,' when under high pressure and work consistently only when there
is no pressure. Consequently, Pitkin concludes, women are overcautious,
they make poorer drivers than men, and even that 'they cause accidents
on the part of their fellow drivers.' He goes so far as to state that
'owing to their inferior motor outlets, women succeed best in outer
behavior in relatively simple motor activities, such as sweeping,
washing, and ironing' rather than in more complex motor tasks like
driving."
The twenties were the decade in which the automobile fully assumed the
functions it has in today's society, with most households having at
least one automobile which is central to their economic and social
lives. Yet, despite the increasing universality of automobile
transportation, and the prospect that women and men might have equal
access to autos by each having one, this period was also characterized
by a solidification of gender roles with respect to cars. Women were
clearly defined to be more restricted in their access to autos, as their
roles as homemaker and nurturer of children were reinterpreted and
applied to their status as automobile operators. Their mechanical
competence and driving skill was portrayed as limited in order to
maintain social boundaries on women's access to transportation for fear
that women might use this access to step beyond their traditional sphere
of activities.
Gender and the Automobile
Since World War II
The process of suburbanization and expanding motorization of the
population, and their reinforcement of the doctrine of separate spheres,
were severely interrupted for fully f if teen years by the Depression
and World War 11. First, economic distress and then shortages, rationing
and military service brought great discontinuities in families' patterns
of residential location and travel. But after the war we resumed the
previous pattern of suburbanization with renewed commitment, as if to
make up for lost time. Suburbs grew more rapidly than ever, and autos
became the nation's primary mode of commuting as highway building and
single-family housing subsidy programs reinforced our shared commitment
to this pattern. Home remained the separate sphere of women, and in
keeping with that image the design of suburban residential tracts
stressed built-in cabinets, versatile kitchen appliances and provision
of play areas for children.' Suburbs wore still designed as dormitories
for downtown workplaces, and freeways were built to replace commuter
railroads , nd trolley lines as connections to the traditional
downtowns. Betty Fricdan, in The Feminine Mystique. criticized the
physical environment of the suburbs nearly as vigorously as she did the
anachronistic 'cult of domesticity,' which had been carried to new
extremes in post-war America.
The Nature of Recent
Changes in Women's Social Roles
During the past two decades it has become obvious that the place of
women in the economic life of America has been changing substantially.
While some would credit the women's movement for increasing
participation of women in the labor force, the changes may be more
attributable to transformation of the economy as services, information
processing, finance, and retailing have eclipsed manufacturing and heavy
industry as the sources of most employment. Because work in these types
of jobs did not require downtown locations, and the labor force is now
increasingly concentrated in the suburbs, a growing proportion of all
jobs have come to be concentrated in the suburbs. Indeed, the 1970
census showed that more people travelled to work from suburb to suburb
than from suburb to downtown or entirely within the central city.
The automobile has become the overwhelmingly dominant mode of
cornmuting, and urban transit systems have steadily lost passengers
despite major infusions of public subsidies and the construction of new
rail systems in several cities. Service and retailing establishments
located in the suburbs to take advantage of lower cost land, proximity
to their markets, and proximity to a low-priced labor force, consisting
increasingly of suburban women. The suburbs are in the eighties home to
a variety of families, many of which do and many of which do not match
the traditional stereotypes. Most suburban women are in the labor force,
and many single-parent, female-headed households reside in the suburbs
alongside two-parent households. Suburban households often have as many
automobiles as they have licensed drivers, and yet differences in roles
and travel patterns persist as an echo of the past. Women still make the
vast majority of the household's trips for the purposes of shopping,
taking children to school, doctors, dentists, and child-care, and their
work trips are predictably shorter than men's in part because the demand
of these household roles persists and must be considered as women
contemplate employment alternatives.
Conclusion
For a hundred years we have associated the city with male
characteristics. Cities epitomize assertiveness through their economic
activity, intellectual creativity and centrality in world affairs.
Simultaneously, we have associated the suburbs with woman's sphere. We
thought of the suburbs as places of domesticity, passivity, repose,
closeness to nature, and spiritual values."' Scholars have
frequently noted this dichotomy when describing the place of the home
and house in American society. They have less often noted the central
role which transportation has played in both creating and maintaining
this dichotomy, and the utility of travel data for measuring the extent
of the dichotomy.
By permitting the spatial separation of home and workplace within the
bounds of reasonable expenditures of time and cost, public transit and
the automobile encouraged cities to develop spatially in response to the
image of separate spheres which was so central to American culture. And
current studies of transportation patterns provide us with measures of
the extent to which that image still dominates family and economic lift,
The automobile did not create the separation of gender spheres, nor has
any technological innovation been sufficiently powerful to lessen the
influence of this cultural norm in American life.
Women have entered the work force in very large numbers but still make
work trips which are on average substantially shorter than men's. Women,
whether they are working or not, make many more trips for the purpose of
'serving passengers,' e.g., delivering someone else to a destination of
importance to that person. While women today have nearly universal
access to automobiles and the labor market, they continue to inhabit the
domestic sphere, and their travel patterns reflect this.
Lower paid workers have always made shorter work trips than higher paid
ones. Poorer workers a century ago lived near their places of employment
because the cost of transport would deplete their earnings if they moved
farther away. Today we find that women live closer to their jobs than do
employed men in the same households. There are three factors which,
taken together, may explain this phenomenon. Firstly, women arc
substantially lower paid than men. While more women are in the labor
force than ever before, they tend to hold the same types of jobs as they
did in the fifties. Women are over-represented in what is called the
'secondary' work force, consisting of part-time or seasonal workers, and
are concentrated in job classifications in which the vast majority of
employees are women, especially in clerical and sales work. These
positions pay lower wages than the positions traditionally held by men,
and it is argued by some that women select jobs closer to home because
searching farther away yields no wage advantage among the jobs for which
many women qualify. Secondly, women may work closer to home because the
recent suburbanization of service and retail activity has resulted in
'women' jobs being more evenly distributed across the urban landscape
than the professional and technical jobs which are more typically held
by men. In other words, women are filling the jobs which in the first
place moved to the suburbs in order to take advantage of a proximate low
paid workforce, and those jobs involve shorter commuting distances for
just that reason. Thirdly, women work closer to home and drive shorter
distances in part because, even as they enter the workforce, they retain
their family obligations as nurturers, shoppers, and homemakers. Because
of the time commitments involved in these activities, and the need to be
nearer to children in case of a school emergency call, women choose work
locations in order to minimize travel and maximize productive uses of
their time Susan Saegert has written that men who enter the work force
rely on their wives for support, but few male workers have no wives to
rely upon.
Even as women enter the economic 'World of work in record numbers, and
drive cars in record numbers, they retain the traditional role for which
the suburbs were designed in the first place. The structure of suburban
life, the low densities and the distances which must be traversed,
continue to limit women's full entry into what has traditionally been
man's sphere, and that is not surprising since they were built with
distinct gender roles in mind. Surveys have shown that men continue to
prefer suburban living, but working women who value both their family
roles and their work have reported that they find it easier to juggle
their dual responsibilities in urban rather than suburban environments,
where child-care, shopping, and services are available at shorter
distances from the home. It is not surprising that this is the case,
since women are now exerting extra effort and energy to blend roles
which were consciously planned to take place In spatially separated
locations.
Many have predicted that women's travel patterns will come in the near
future to resemble men's, but that prediction has been based mostly on
the simple expectation that differences between men and women's travel
were primarily derived from their different levels of participation in
the workforce. If we accept, however, travel patterns to be a reflection
of a much broader pattern derived from the cultural norm of domesticity,
and we note that women's domestic roles are persistent because the
cultural stereotyping of gender roles is persistent, it follows that
women's travel patterns will continue to differ substantially from those
of men. The family with two cars and two workers is not necessarilly a
family in which men's and women's roles are equalized. Our society's
expectations regarding women's and men's roles gave rise to the land-use
transportation system which we have today, and while evolution of
transportation technology and urban form have changed travel patterns in
marginal ways, it remains to be seen whether America is ready to adopt
new models of gender roles. Travel patterns of men and women will not
create those changes in cultural norms, but rather will be an indicator
as to whether or not they have occurred.
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Women's Travel Issues - Baltimore
1996 - Conference: