Nick's Page

This page is to summarize my paper: Memories to Trace a Movement

The use of the sources are also summarized very briefly afterwards.

Paper Summary

In Carolyn Cassady’s short memoir, “Cars I Have Known”, found in a collection of short stories pertaining to women and their cars, Ladies Start Your Engines, Cassady, the wife of the famous Beat personality Neal Cassady, recalls the different automobiles she has owned, or ridden in, that have made a significant imprint in her memory. The memoir can be broken up into three sections – childhood, college-years, and adulthood – in which a liberating movement for Cassady as a woman can be traced, and even though her growing independence is not directly related to the cars and travels of her memory, the recollection of the cars, and the times in her life that they represent, show how she became an independent woman in the age of feminism and equal rights. In the section of her childhood memories of a her nanny's husband's Model-T Ford, and her families Ford and REO Flying Cloud, Cassady describes the role of women in the time of her youth. The women of this time are inferior to men in that they do not own or operate the vehicles that she remembers. In the second section, in which Cassady talks of her car in college, she describes how she is able to earn money to buy her own car and break free of the oppression women in the time of her childhood. With this memory, we can see that Cassady is beginning to embrace the equal rights ideals of the feminist movement, but not completely. Even though she buys the car with her own earnings, and has every right to own a vehicle, she is stilled worried about her father's opinion of a female owning a car. Then, in the third section, Cassady finds independence as she escapes the social standard of the inferior female when she leaves cars to her husband and son and moves on her own to London.