Fiona, Rosie, Shirley, and Me
On Chicks, Bikes, Stick Shift & Machines
This is Fiona the Fiat. She is 12 years old in car years, 15 months in my care. We call her Fifi. I bought her all cash, sight unseen, from a dealership in Ohio. When the delivery driver, a man of Eastern European descent, pulled up in front of our building with Fifi in tow, I said, “Hi, how was the drive?” and he said, “Whaaat?? My god, I see you and I think, ‘How this woman will drive this car?’”
I wasn’t sure if I should be worried or offended. It turned out a little of both. What he meant was, What woman knows how to drive stick shift?
Well, somewhat curiously, this woman does. As do her two older sisters, who learned as teenagers on a 1989 Honda Accord coupe, then taught me later that year when I turned 16.
What were they thinking when they convinced my parents to buy this car, neither of them knowing how to drive it? By that time, automatic transmissions were the norm1. Stick shift cars were old school—driven primarily in rural areas and by hippies and car enthusiasts.
The few young people we knew who could drive a manual were male. In a way, it tracked: We’d been raised in a toxically patriarchal environment, which drove us to keep up with the boys and disdain girly-girls. I also suspect my sisters conspired to make the car theirs exclusively, knowing my parents would never in a million years learn.
*
Driving is power. It is freedom to determine where and when and how fast. Unsurprisingly, the proverbial and literal driver’s seat has traditionally belonged to men.
Evolution on this front has been relatively slow. In 2002, feminist pioneer and writer Katha Pollitt published in The New Yorker her popular essay “Learning to Drive,” in which she recounted driving lessons at age 52, on the heels of destabilizing abandonment by her male lover. She recognized the paradox of being helpless to operate a common machine while careering as a professional feminist:
How did this happen to me? For decades, all around me women were laying claim to forbidden manly skills—how to fix the furnace, perform brain surgery, hunt seals, have sex without love. Only I, it seems, stood still, as the machines in my life increased in both number and complexity.
In this case, driving represented self sufficiency more generally, and Pollitt was not in fact alone. The essay resonated widely and was made into a film starring Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley in 2014.
At the same time, beyond the U.S., the Women Right to Drive movement, initiated by Saudi activist Wajeha al-Huwaider, drew worldwide attention to male control of women’s mobility and led eventually to the 2017 lifting of the Saudi driving ban for women. This legal milestone, while meaningful, did not remove male guardianship laws that restrict women’s movements in at least 20 countries, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon—where women cannot travel freely without sanction by a husband, father, or brother.2
As recently as 2025, here in the dis-United States, the massively popular Netflix series The Hunting Wives featured in its first episode protagonist Sophie admitting to her new frenemy-lover Margo that she doesn’t drive—ostensibly for good reason but primarily to appease her patronizing husband, whose job has brought them to East Texas from Boston. Sexy, alpha Margo (the boss’s wife) sets her sights on liberating doe-eyed Sophie; which, it turns out, doesn’t take much. “You’re gonna drive, and you’re gonna do some donuts.” In a parking lot in Margo’s pickup, Margo gives Sophie a swig of whisky, talks her through shifting into first gear (of course Margo drives stick shift), and sends her off to the races—vroom-vrooming in screechy circles toward her true empowered self.
If driving is empowerment, driving stick shift for a girl or woman is that power on turbo charge.
*
The Honda did not have a name, nor a gender. I had two more manual-transmission cars before Fifi. First a ‘91 four-speed Saturn wagon with 225k miles on it. The owner grew up on a farm in the Midwest and predicted rightly that she was a strong girl and probably had another 75k left on her.
Next was an ‘01 five-speed Subaru. I’d looked specifically for manual, and they were difficult to find. They were also, to my surprise, more expensive.3 I was confronted with the fact of my preference for manual gear shift and the question of what it was worth—evidently, the legwork and a little extra cost. But the gender neutral “Sube” turned out to be a lemon and a money pit. First it was the suspension, then the brakes, then the exhaust. In retrospect I would have named it Lester after the used card salesman who likely concealed accident history and other failures.
For the next several years, I leased automatics, trading in each anonymous, new-car-smell vehicle after 36 months. I drove in and out of Jiffy Lube once a year, but other than that detached myself from the vehicle’s inner workings. It was the auto equivalent of living in a hotel.
In his memoir Shop Class as Soul Craft, philosopher and mechanic Matthew B. Crawford argues for the value of manual competence—urging us to consider
what is at stake when experiences [of making things and fixing things] recede from our common life. How does this affect the prospects for full human flourishing?
Recognizing “the attractions of being disburdened of involvement with our own stuff,” he extols “work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful,” along with “the ethics of maintenance and repair.” Ultimately, for our own psychic wellness, we require “some measure of self-reliance—the kind that requires focused engagement with our material things.”
Nearly thirty years ago, my former husband and I purchased our first home—a 600 sq-foot fixer-upper in South Seattle. K knew his way around power tools, and we knew we would have to do most of the gut renovation ourselves. Initially I was most helpful with demo, swinging a crow bar at lathe and plaster and donning a Hannibal Lecter-esque respirator mask. But I also learned to use a power drill, a Sawzall, and a circular saw, to assist with hanging drywall and cutting two by fours.
I remember how unnatural it felt to wield these sharp, heavy tools and trigger them into high-decibel electric action. Even with goggles and thick gloves, blade guards in place, I was ever aware of the speed and furious intensity at which these small machines drove through solid wood and metal. There was a dangerous power in my hands, and it made my digits and eyeballs anxious.
On the flipside, however, were the energizing forces of agency, competence, and usefulness.
We replaced windows, built walls, laid bathroom tile, built a fence and a deck, refinished floors, recycled every building material we could find. It was exhausting, dirty, and seemingly endless labor. We lived in the house through every half-demolished, half-functional phase, including seasons of outdoor cooking and toileting, and tarp-covered windows through rain storms. Four years in, the project had drained and isolated us. And we didn’t have the means to “just pay someone.”
It was a demoralizing time, frankly. But twenty-some years later, I can look back with gratitude for my youthful naiveté. In the end, a combination of financial constraints and Crawford’s question of “full human flourishing” converged.
In the fifth year, the community-based nonprofit I worked for began confronting the effects of gentrification, to which we were contributing. Both the service population and the staff were being priced out of the neighborhood. Together with the board, we made a plan—to sell the house to the organization well below market for their long-term use as an affordable rental and asset, while still maintaining modest equity for our own futures. This was only possible because we had done most of the work ourselves.
I remember those last months before closing, finishing up final projects—wielding our machines and tools with a sense of purpose. Before then, our primary purpose had been homemaking. And while the satisfactions of DIY craftsmanship were gratifying, we’d found that without a greater usefulness, deploying our efforts had become mere toil. I gained in my 20s a life-long understanding—actual muscle memory—of both the ethics and economics of self-reliance.
I think about toil and purpose when I think about women operating machines. While certain applications of manual skills may empower and liberate, not all machine work does. In his exhortation of material engagement, Crawford homes in specifically on work that requires intellectual and cognitive engagement (problem-solving, diagnostics, application of training and experience) and whose end is objectively useful (the engine ignites, the ship floats, the plane flies).
He does not, however, by his own admission, focus on the equity aspects of the trade industries. “This book is concerned less with economics,” he writes, “than it is with the experience of making things and fixing things.”
Acknowledging that frugality drives some measure of the “cutting-edge chic” that younger people attach to “the home economics of our grandmothers”—knitting, gardening, baking—he contends financial concerns are secondary to spiritual ones:
The new interest in self-reliance seems to have arisen before the specter of hard times. Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it.
As for questions of gender equity, Crawford writes
It so happens that most of the characters who appear in this book are men, but I am sure that women, no less than men, will recognize the appeal of tangible work that is straightforwardly useful.
It stands to argue that it doesn’t just so happen that women make up only approximately 4.5% of construction workers, 3% of electricians and carpenters,4 12% of auto mechanics,5 and 6% of active pilots.6 On the other hand, they make up some 30% of the manufacturing workforce, where they hold only one in four leadership positions7 and are underrepresented in higher-paid positions like welders (5.1%) and machinists (6.8%).8 Not all manual work is created equally, nor equally accessible to all.9
According to interviewees in the documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, women who joined the defense workforce during World War II10 were trained not only as aircraft riveters, but also welders, machinists, mechanics, shell-burners, and ship-fitters. The work was strenuous and sometimes dangerous. The pay was better than their previous jobs as domestics and assembly line workers, and many learned skills they were good at and enjoyed.
During both wars, women workers also experienced a new professional camaraderie and collectivity: While racism and sexism certainly persisted in wartime factories, workers’ unions fought for pay equity for both white women and Black women.
Wartime “Rosies” took pride in doing their part—fighting fascism, honoring men fighting overseas, and indeed recognizing “the appeal of tangible work that is straightforwardly useful.” Yet, as soon as the war ended, women were first to be laid off, regardless of skills or performance. Non-defense skilled jobs were reserved for returning soldiers. And while propaganda messaging aggressively recruited women to the trades during the war, the end of the war triggered an about face: The men were home; the women could (should) return to their time-honored duties of motherhood, homemaking, and service work, along with their subordinate positions of dependency. For women who hoped for a continuation of economic independence and skills training, it was a government-sponsored bait and switch.
*
In the early 2000s, midwife and women’s rights advocate Sara Shahverdi became the first woman elected to political office in her rural village in Iran. Her life and journey are documented in the 2025 Oscar-nominated documentary CUTTING THROUGH ROCKS.
Sara was the favored daughter of a father who—wishing for a son (several would be born later)—treated Sara like a boy, taking her places where only boys could go. “I felt free,” she says. “He let me choose my own clothes.” All this freedom predetermined Sara to rebel against patriarchal traditions (she is also divorced and childless).
Sara’s father also taught her construction skills; and, crucially, he taught her to ride a motorcycle.
When Sara gathers a group of young girls to encourage them in their educational and professional ambitions, she has them meet her outside the village, all of them in jeans and sweatshirts and buzzed with excitement, with their borrowed motorcycles. Sara wraps their heads and faces ominously in scarves, like bandits, lest anyone recognize them as they ride. “This feels great,” one of the girls says, with the open road behind and before them. Their turbo-charged empowerment is palpable; as are the forces primed to arrest it.
In this case, the very act of deploying the machine’s intended use—efficient, independent movement from place to place—enables the possibility of every kind of self-reliance: emotional, physical, financial. Unlike for Crawford, a white American male, or myself, a middle-class woman in a Western context, there is no distinction between economic, ethical, or psychic empowerment in this subversive act: they are all of a piece.
In one particular way, Sara’s story resonated with me. For several years I had ridden on the back of a motorcycle driven by my male partner. In my late 30’s, when I was driving stick-shift cars, I also became a licensed motorcyclist and acquired a beautiful 1995 Kawasaki Vulcan 500.
There really was nothing like it. Speed, exposure to the open air, intoxicating freedom. Operating my cruiser was indeed similar to driving a stick shift—together, hand and foot communicated directly with gears to speed and slow the vehicle. Steering was similar enough to bicycling, combining body-weight shifts with slight handlebar movement and calibrations of speed going into and out of turns. As with a car and power tools, hand and foot to metal, generating motion, translated into agency and power.
The danger was present too; though not in the way I expected. Primarily I drove on winding country roads, at 40 to 55mph. This was the easy part. It was at low speeds and stationary—traffic lights, parking lots—where I struggled with the strength and balance to hold the bike upright. The fifth time I dropped her, at an intersection—I called my partner to both pick me up and help me pick her up—I conceded failure of mastery and competence. My frustration, and repair costs, were mounting. The Vulcan and me (we never quite bonded, so I didn’t name her) were just not going to work out.
I sold the bike and gave up on motorcycles for a while. Just as for a time I gave up on high-maintenance and stick shift cars. Equal to my impulse to self-empower was my ambivalence toward the responsibility of that power. I would have to invest more deeply in my skills and in maintenance. Instead, I went back to being a passenger.
*
“We now like our things not to disturb us,” writes Crawford. Despite a gender blindspot, the mission of his book—to interrogate what “lull[s] us into accepting as inevitable, or even desirable, our increasing manual disengagement”—is compelling. He identifies insightfully that many of us are ambivalent about our relationship to our stuff.
Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces. We worry that we are becoming stupider, and wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.
Technology promises the touch-of-a-button ease of automation. But is it really ease to have no understanding of how our stuff works? Are “the attractions of being disburdened of involvement with our own stuff” just smoke and mirrors designed to sell us complicated devices and decrease our agency and self-reliance? Crawford’s book pre-dates mass social media: Marketing has become only more sophisticated, relentless, and effective.
For women, these traps have added layers: Women and girls who have or want to develop manual competence and pursue careers in the trades will (and do) face discrimination11 by men protecting their domain. Others of us will lean into internalized ideas of our unfitness and helplessness in the face of engagement with machines, especially if we have a man in our life who seems happy to fill the role.
Ideally we would see more of the increasing equilibrium we see in, for example, STEM fields—in proportion to ability and interest. Surely there are also men who would prefer to do more child care than home repair but don’t feel the freedom to do so, in part because of disapproval from men and women alike. And what does said disapproval mean for the sons and daughters of the next generation?
The impact of gendered career possibilities is both psychic and economic: The average salary for a construction manager is $103k,12 while the average salary for a social worker is $65k and a teacher $59k.13
Trends are positive if slow: Women are entering the trades at increasing rates, and support organizations advocate on behalf of girls and women who seek nontraditional paths. The “cutting-edge chic” appeal of DIY for young people, along with a desire to be better drivers, has also apparently sparked a movement to learn to drive stick shift, as seen in this Today Show segment, “Why Gen Z is Revved Up About Driving Stick Shift.”
As for me, just the other day, I brought Fifi to a mechanic, who expressed surprise—pleasant, I should say—at both her manual transmission and the fact that a woman had brought her in. My surprise was the bill, particularly the hourly rate for labor. While I might not be replacing brakes myself any time soon, I’m watching YouTube videos on how to replace a detached gearshift cover and am intent on refreshing my tire-changing skills.
And, I am once again driving a motorized bike—this time a lightweight electric scooter, co-owned with my male partner, called Shirley. She is quiet, low to the ground, and easy to maneuver at all speeds. This time around, age and experience have made more productive use of ambivalence; let’s call it compromise. Simple to operate and maintain, Shirley is more our collaborator than a beast of burden to be mastered. She is our best girl, and I think it’s going to work out.
Recommended Reading / Viewing:
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford (2010)
Women and the Machine by Julie Wosk (2001)
Cutting Through Rocks, documentary film by Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni (2025)
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, documentary film by Connie Field (1980)
Homefront Heroines, interactive digital documentary project
“Glamour Girls of 1943” (Office of War Information recruitment film)
This was in the late 2000s, around the time automatic transmissions surpassed manuals in fuel efficiency.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) statistics
While Crawford does describe the historical detachment of cognitive engagement from both manual labor AND office work, he does not address specific impacts on women.
Statistics on the total number of women who joined the workforce during WWII vary, e.g. the US Dept of War: “Around 5 million civilian women served in the defense industry and elsewhere in the commercial sector during World War II with the aim of freeing a man to fight.” The National WWII Museum in New Orleans: “More than six million women took wartime jobs in factories.”
One of my own recent ideas is to start a repair/mend group in our town. As you point out, using our hands (and brains) can change our relationship with stuff — and the environment. I really appreciate the way you take a deep dive into this topic.
This is great! I have few real regrets about my life choices, but a big one is never having learned how to drive a stick shift. And if it's any encouragement, my son (successfully) replaced the brake pads on his old BMW by following a YouTube video. There was apparently swearing, but nobody died.