Gender and Mobility: Clark University feminist-geographer Susan Hanson delivers Third Annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture in Transportation
Clark University Professor Susan Hanson delivered a lively talk in Wurster Hall auditorium on October 17 to an audience of students, alumni, faculty, and guests. The third in the annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lectures in Transportation, her talk, “Gender and Mobility: A Feminist Geographer’s Perspective,” doubled as a kick-off for the City and Regional Planning Department’s 60th anniversary celebration.
The Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture series, established in 2006 by a core group of Wachs’s students to honor him upon his retirement, attracts provocative thinkers to address pressing issues in transportation. Wachs taught for 35 years at the University of California. A former director of ITS, he retired from Berkeley in 2005 and is now Director of the Transportation, Space and Technology Program at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica.
Hanson opened with a telling story about one of the 19th century suffragette movement’s iconic figures, Frances Willard of Evanston, Illinois, who, in 1895, published a book called A Wheel Within a Wheel: A Woman’s Quest for Freedom. A best seller at the time, Willard tells the story about how she defied convention -- not to mention the long hoop skirts and binding corsets of her day -- and learned to ride a bicycle at the age of 53.
Willard’s bike became an implement of her power and freedom, said Hanson, “offering an exhilarating feeling of liberation, which led to increased confidence, a sense of accomplishment, and expanded possibilities.” With that nugget of truth, said Hanson, Willard put her finger on one aspect of an abiding interest in gender and mobility.
But, of course, that’s only where Hanson’s story begins. Hanson raised two related questions that she and others have pursued in their research: how do patterns of mobility or immobility create or disrupt gender norms? And the opposing query: How does gender shape mobility, or said another way adding a geographer’s spin, how does gender shape geographic processes?
“It can mean access to opportunity, as it did for Willard. In some places, mobility is empowering quite simply because it’s a way to leave the house and enter the public domain. This, in some incremental way, challenges gender power structures,” she said, referring to a colleague’s project carried out in 174 villages in norternh India in 2005.
This equation embodies the most common view of how mobility shapes gender. But there’s another view to be reckoned with, said Hanson, who has written extensively on the role of gender and context in entrepreneurship, IT, and urban sustainability. “And that is that mobility is not necessarily empowering.” What about women in the Bronx who travel long distances on public transit to get to low-wage jobs? Are these women mobile by choice or by constraint?
Hanson went on to discuss women’s and men’s differing spatial ranges—who drives longer distances to work, who works closer to home and why? What about travel habits outside work? And, as some studies suggest, how do race and ethnicity affect study results? You guessed it. The many variables—race, age, place, time, in other words, geographical and social context—can be significant enough to turn the first theorem of empowerment = mobility on its head.
“Mobility is about the individual embedded in and interacting with the household, family, community, and larger society. As geographers and planners, we know that context matters. All these matter in understanding how and why gender influences mobility.” Hanson concluded with a plea for more research, specifically for “research that is place-based and context-sensitive, especially in the emergent area of sustainability science. Work that includes such context,” she added, “must do so not in skeletal ways, but by making the relevant elements of place and context absolutely central to the analysis.”
Comments from discussants Therese McMillan, Deputy Executive Direction of Policy at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Celia Kupersmith, General Manager and CEO of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District followed, raising those policy, transportation, and quality of life-work issues that dovetailed with Hanson’s closing statement made by Marty Wachs. “While many scholars write about the persistence of separate spheres in the workplace and the home, few have recognized that this phenomenon is also pervasive in our highways and transit systems.”
As the Q&A wound down, Wachs leapt to the microphone for some closing remarks. He got a laugh when he told a story about his father, who always washed the dishes at home in gratitude to his mother, but who, when asked by the young Marty, why his father always did the driving, was speechless. “And oh,” he remarked, “did you know it’s also the 60th anniversary of In-N-Out Burger?"
—Nancy Bronstein