Women on road trips aren't tragedies waiting to happen. Like men, we're free
Women on road trips aren't tragedies waiting to happen. Like men, we're free
We don’t hear enough about women doing epic, exhilarating things without the comfortably defining presence of a man
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“Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me... what a long, strange trip it’s been.” Photograph: Alamy
I helped a newly engaged friend move her belongings last month from New York to San Francisco, where she was relocating to live with her fiance. We departed the city on a Friday morning in her yellow Fiat, made quick stop in Philadelphia, and then set out on a route that took us through South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and finally California. A plot synopsis of our trip would read: two successful women, one large dog, one tiny car. No schedule. And a lot of Tay Tay. Over the next 10 days our Instagram feeds, full of fantastic pictures of us adventuring through the county, sent most of my friends into paroxysms of joy and envy in equal parts. It was the from which stuff iconic movies are made. Except they aren’t. Not about women, anyway. And I’m never more aware of this than when I’m on the road. And I have been on the road a lot, almost always by myself or with another woman.
. . . . .
I’m likely not telling you anything you don’t already know to some degree. Go West is both this country’s rallying cry and its promise. The promise of new life, of freedom, of the ability to start over, whomever you are, wherever you came from. The story of America is the story of being on the road. At least, if you’re a man.
The story of women on the road, when we do get it, is almost always one of fear or invisibility. Women traveling alone are habitually escaping from something or are stripped of any agency at all. When they do travel safely and/or happily, it’s because they are accessories to heroic men whose journeys they are aiding - as if they are shiny hubcaps, or rattling engine parts, along either to make our hero look better, or to be shed in a bid for even more freedom.
. . . . .
This may be changing. Slowly. As more women venture out alone, the lament over lack of female road narratives grows louder. In recent years there have been a few female adventure stories that have really hit pay dirt, suggesting, as with so many women-centric plots, that the problem is not that the audience does not exist, nor that the story does not resonate. It’s just that we’re not telling them enough. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love are the best, most recent examples, and I devoured them both. Reaching farther back, I find Beryl Markham, the British-African racehorse trainer, safari pilot and the first woman to fly her plane east to west over the Atlantic, who wrote the incredible memoir West With the Night and is currently being revisited in the form of a best-selling novel.
. . .
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/06/women-road-trips-freedom-narratives
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