Monday, April 12, 2021

MY AUTOMOBILE SET ME FREE

 

Between the First and Second World Wars, University of Kentucky women (students, alumnae, faculty, and faculty spouses, published poems in Letters, the campus literary magazine and in the Kentucky Kernel.  Many of the poems explored the contradictions in women’s lives, their views toward careers and marriage, and expressions of freedom.

Perhaps more than anything the automobile changed both the perception and the reality of women’s lives during this period.  Cars offered a degree of freedom not previously experienced by women, and they quickly realized and understood the extent of this change.  It also provided women a means of transportation without depending on men or public transportation.  Writing in Letters in the summer of 1930, Louise Good, a member of the University Scribbler's Club and Chair of Literature for the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs, aptly described this sense of freedom for women:

My Automobile

My automobile is a jailor's key
Unlocking my chains and setting me free
Setting me free on the open road
A gypsy song my only goad
With seven-league boots I'm swiftly shod
I'm armed with Mercury's winged rod
I step on the carpet of Bagdad and soar
Far, far away from my prison door.
No pirate, watching his foaming keel,
Feels freer than I, in my automobile.


From Our Rightful Place: Women at the University of Kentucky, 1880-1945 (University Press of Kentucky) 2020

April is National Poetry Month
 



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