Women & Car Repair

ARTICLE

The Best Man for the Job...May be a Woman

Deep down in her mind, Stephanie Judy always knew she could understand car repair. But she had been intimidated by its mystique—not to mention the many breakdowns her '63 Bug suffered and the equally numerous put-downs by mechanics. Judy (her real surname), 37, married a man who fared just as poorly with his '65 Porsche. The tyranny of their temperamental cars was as exasperating as it was expensive.

Then, one day, Judy vowed to learn to take care of the cars herself. With unswerving faith in the written word, she scoured bookstores and picked up every manual by every “expert” and every “insider.”

The manuals proved to be written on the assumption a woman would not read them or were outright insulting in their attitude toward women. Moreover, most of them offered little practical help.

The so-called “experts” began too far ahead of her; the “insiders” really didn’t want to let go of any information.

Judy didn’t want to rebuild an engine. She didn’t need any custom modifications. She wanted a book with simple, useful, survival-oriented information that she could comprehend.

“I began to see that if the Experts and the Insiders won’t tell us what we need to know, then we’ll just have to tell one another,” says Judy.

And so—after learning the hard way—she wrote her own book: Everything I Know About Cars Would Just About Fill a Book.

The Road to Learning

When Deanna Sclar moved to California a decade ago, her enthusiasm for life in the sun was dampened by the realization that this meant a life on the roadways. She lived in Santa Monica, 20 miles down the San Diego Freeway from her job at a publishing company.

She bought a '67 Mustang with 70,000 miles on it. It was all that she could afford; besides, a friend assured her it was healthy and a mechanic hailed it as a “classic.”

The bargain Mustang barely survived the trip to register at the motor vehicle bureau.

The radiator overheated constantly: she managed to keep it running for the weeks that followed only by filling and refilling.

...And changing the coolant.

...And putting gunk in the radiator to block leaks.

She lived in fear the car would blow up.

Forty dollars later, she discovered all she needed was a $2 radiator cap. That was when Sclar decided to learn a bit more about cars and enrolled in a night course.

“I didn’t even know how to get the hood of a car open when I started,” she recalls. “It just blew my mind to find that I could change oil and tune the car, flush the cooling system easily and so much more cheaply—and that it was fun.”

She fell in love with cars and left her publishing job to write her own book: Auto Repair for Dummies.

Closet Dummies

Both books found their audiences. Auto Repair for Dummies (McGraw-Hill, $12.95) has sold close to 250,000 copies and has just been revised and enlarged by Sclar; Everything I Know About Cars (Berkley Windhover, $3.95) sold out its first printing—despite, says Judy, a near-lack of promotion by publisher Putnam’s.

Although both Sclar and Judy count themselves as feminists, the authors say that their books were not slanted to women.

Sclar’s readers include her teenage son and college-age daughter, who have their first cars. She credits her book’s success to the fact that it was written for beginners—male or female.

“I didn’t want to call my book ‘Auto Repair for Women’ because I felt that women didn’t need special language or special talking to,” says Sclar. “I knew a lot of guys who were doctors and lawyers who felt just as ignorant and stupid about cars.”

Whereas women could admit they didn’t know something, says Sclar, “these guys were bringing Mercedes into mechanics trying to behave as if they knew about the cars and getting ripped off right and left.” “Closet dummies,” she calls them.

Being female, however, was an asset in selling the book to publisher and to public. It made it different from all other car books and, says Sclar, “it’s what made people believe, probably, I could write for dummies”—sexist thinking, but a selling point.

Judy, who has a year-old daughter, took the same tact.

“Because I’m a woman, most people assume I wrote it for that purpose—’Oh, you wrote that book for women,’” she says, mimicking a quote she frequently hears.

“But a lot of information is needed just as badly by men. When it comes to things like car repair, men are even in worse circumstances because they feel they’re supposed to know—they can’t even admit they don’t know.”

She says the book’s title pretty well describes the contents.

“I just basically learned up to a certain point, and told everything I knew, and was close enough to the experience of learning to remember what that was like,” she says.

The book was written when she had two different VWs, says Judy, and most of what she learned for the book she learned on a Bug. She didn’t want to make it a VW book, however, and had to work hard to generalize it.

She was guided by a belief that the best way to learn something “is to ask someone who knows just a little bit more than you do—but who’s close enough to being a beginner to remember what it is that you’re going to stumble over.”

“I never learned a whole lot more than is in that book,” she says.

Likewise, Sclar says her book assumes “total ignorance.” It shows what a screwdriver looks like and provides step-by-step instructions for the basic car tasks.

It’s the only kind of book she would have been able to understand herself before she studied auto repair. Most of the “easy” car guides, she remembers, made too many assumptions.

“For example, Chilton’s Easy Car Care Guide would say things like: ‘Changing the timing on a car is easy. All you have to do is take an offset wrench and loosen the hold-down bolt on your distributor. You just turn the distributor and tighten up the bolt.’

“And that’s true—it’s easy, except if you don’t know what an offset wrench is, and you don’t know what your distributor is, and you don’t know what the bolt is.”

She decided to call it Auto Repair for Dummies “because everyone who was a dummy would recognize at first sight that this was the book for them.”

Gaining Respect

The reactions from the ranks of mechanics was a mixture of startled looks and snickers. But the ridicule, says Sclar, quickly gave way to respect.

“I would go into a parts department looking for something,” she recalls, “and all the men would come out from the back of the place to look at me. ‘Hey, there’s the lady mechanic outside,’ they’d say.

“Or, ‘Did your husband send you in for these?’

“I’d answer, ‘No, I’m restoring my car,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, right.’ And then they’d ask me all kinds of questions about parts that didn’t exist.”

Sclar’s response was to stay friendly and enthusiastic. As soon as the mechanics saw that she really knew what she was doing, she says, “all the bull ended.”

She didn’t feel unwelcome—there was no feeling of trespassing. The reason, explains Sclar, is that “car freaks are car freaks.”

In the end, she became good friends with several of the male mechanics and learned from them.

A lot of the men that were the nicest to me were lifelong mechanics in their 50s and 60s,” says Sclar. “They were just enchanted that women were going into this field and opening it up.”

Two senior mechanics at a Mercedes dealership in Santa Monica stayed after the 6 o’clock closing hour—sometimes as late as 8 or 9—teaching her to use special tools “and just dumping as much knowledge into my head as they could.”

Until then, says Sclar, “they thought that no woman could really understand what they were doing—it wasn’t something they thought they could share.”

And they championed the book. They couldn’t wait to show it to their wives—”I’m going to bring Heidi your book...let her fix her car.”

Sclar believes it’s a shame because learning the essentials of auto care is an important means of becoming independent.

“A car itself is a very macho image, and for a woman to control and nurture that symbol is very powerful for getting into her own power.”

At the time Sclar was writing the book, she was going through her own consciousness raising. She never before had any faith in her manual dexterity.

“For me to be able to control a car in the sense of being able to know what was wrong with it and fix it and keep it running,” she says, “gave me a tremendous feeling of ability, independence and personal power.”

Judy also points out that women are conditioned to think that car repair is a “man’s province.”

She recalls the time she was moving and stopped at a truck stop to put air in one of her car’s tires. The air hose had a chuck designed to fit a truck tire.

She asked the mechanic if he would change the chuck and he said, “Oh, here, I’ll fill your tires for you.”

When she told him that was very kind of him, but she’d prefer to put the air in herself, he threw the chuck at her.

Another time, she couldn’t unlock the steering wheel in a rented car.

With great reluctance, she asked a male friend if he could help her. He unlocked it in a second, but he refused to show how he did it.

“He just pointed to his cock and walked away,” she recalls.

When a woman asks for help, the job often is taken over, she says.

“A lot of men don’t understand the difference between ‘I want to help you because you need help’ and ‘I want to help you because I want to have power over you,’” says Judy.

Adults commonly do the same thing to children, Judy admits. As a mother, she’s aware how often she wants to say, “Oh, here, I’ll do it,” rather than letting her child struggle and learn to solve things herself.

Mind Over Muscle

A popular misconception is that women are too dainty or don’t have the strength to work on cars, say the authors.

“The most dangerous thing is where women themselves believe they’re not strong enough,” says Sclar.

Anyone who’s worked on cars, she says, knows that it takes patience, rarely power. Car repair usually is nothing more than trial and error.

When she began working on cars, Sclar had trouble getting spark plugs loose. At first, she assumed she lacked the strength for it and sought help.

“Hell, half the time the biggest guy in the class couldn’t move it either,” she says.

Men, however, are more likely to assume they can do it. Also, says Sclar, boys are taught at an early age how to focus their strength.

“They know they can pass their energy down their arms into their hands, localize it, and give something a shove and make something happen,” she explains.

Girls, on the other hand, are “rarely taught to use our bodies as levers to focus our strength.”

As for the notion that working on cars is “unladylike,” Sclar laughs. “I think it’s a turn on.”

When she walks into a cocktail party and says that she’s restoring a car, the conversation stops.

“I know a lot of men who are extremely aroused both because of the machismo behind it and because they’re into cars and think, here’s a woman they can communicate with.”

Sure, her hands look like hell, but she points out there are more cleansers to remove grease from skin and clothing than there are cleansers to remove food stains.

“Besides, I’m into organic gardening these days,” she adds, “and my hands look a heck of a lot worse than when I work on cars.”

Judy reports she found one mechanic who would tell her, “Here, you can do it yourself,” and briefly show her what to do.

“I’d go home and scratch my head and puzzle over it and leave the engine standing open for days until I got the nerve to move something,” she says.

Most of what she learned she got from different books and, very slowly, trying things herself.

More and more, however, aspects of cars are getting beyond the ordinary consumer’s capabilities.

We live in a culture where most of us are led to believe we can’t fix the gear that surrounds us—I’m afraid of my refrigerator, I’m afraid of my stereo, I’m dreadfully afraid of my computer.

“I’ve overcome the fear of my car, but I’m afraid of all these other things,” says Judy.

The culprit, she suggests, is the capitalist world’s way of manufacturing and distributing.

“It’s not in the manufacturer’s interests to have consumers able to maintain their own equipment.”

They actively withhold information, she asserts. There’s no better example than the automobile owner’s manual “which tells you where the glove compartment is” but very little else—which is why she was motivated to write her book.