You proud men, male drivers! Better not read this essayIt breaks our hearts to attack you, to have to attack you...However, we just cannot stand it any longer; we cannot stand to see you make… fools of yourselves in our eyes!If a man passes you on the street, it does not matter! But woe if a car passes you by and you see a womansitting at the wheel! One had to pass finally, because you apparentlyhad time on your hands, in any case, your car was still farbelow the permitted average city speed. Now you thinkthat you have been personally insulted. The gas pedal ispressed. No matter what is in front of you, next to you, or behind you.Past, only past this woman again who dared to pass you!I scratch my head – metaphorically speaking: – there are such immense numbers ofwomen driving cars that one can indeed speak ofcomplete equality.Why does the man think he has the sole right to drive better? Perhaps we women ourselves are a little bit to blame for it! If the man is helplessly stuck in car trouble, no one will even think of turning his head towards him when he starts tinkering with the engine. It is different with us. If we only dare to open the hood, we are immediately surrounded by a gloating, grinning crowd of mischievous people from the street around us. Cheeky, meddlesome expressions that drag our incompetence to the fore render us defenseless. We forget that even mechanics who have been in training for four years often have to search for a long time to find a defect. Now something else: If a man drives – or better: wants to drive into a narrow driveway and, perhaps because he is a beginner, he has to back and forth innumerable times until he has managed, no one thinks of reproaching him for it, but a woman in the same scenario is immediately grinned at with pity for the fact that she can’t do it after all because she... is a woman.

Hamburg knows no differences in the statisticsbetween men and women. In Berlin in the year1929 24,967 driver’s licenses were issued, 1,059 of them to women.In that year, 10,266 traffic accidents were reported,accidents caused by the proven fault of the drivers, of which only 99 were women.There the man keeps silent!In any case, it is certain that things aremade infinitely difficult for women to assert themselves as driversnext to men.However, what the motorcyclists are up to is unbelievable! There arefew women motorcyclists; but what I experience every daysounds like the strongest exaggeration. When I pass a fellow malemotorcyclist and he recognizes a woman as thefemale driver, it seems that the devil is riding him. Without anyprudence, he gives full throttle. He wants to prove immediately thatthat he cannot be “beaten” by a woman in the open street in dense traffic.One must assume he feels this way,because he speeds past me like a maniac, no matterwhether he passes me on the right or, if the space does not allow otherwise, ends up all the way to the left of the street, only past mepast me, nothing but past! He dares at this momenteverything and drives as if it were a matter of his life! – It would be beautiful, wonderfully beautiful if we inGermany, and especially in our city were to get along with the malefellow motorists riding the car and the motorcycle and if we were to transform any ridiculous antagonism into upright comradeship! However, to this end, we need the trust of the entire population. And we women deserve it, because we never show ourselves presumptuously as do sometimes... Well, I will spare myselfthe nasty finale. Hertha Herrmann, Hamburg