Female Road Warriors Enjoy Scenery --and Equality--as Truck Drivers

Heather Hogeland of Bloomington, Calif., loves the trees and hills of Tennessee, the wide-open spaces of Montana, the sunrises and sunsets of New Mexico and the thunderstorms in Arizona. She’s seen them all because she’s been driving an 18-wheeler for 23 years.

Long-distance truck driving may strike some as an unusual career for a woman, but many women, like Hogeland, are seeing the country as the driver of a semi. Women in Trucking magazine estimates that a fifth of the 3 million truckers in the U.S. are women.

Helen Barnes of Garden Grove started driving a semi with her husband, Floyd, in 1971, though she now mostly works behind a desk for a trucking company. From her driving days, she recalls a certain picnic spot they routinely visited on the Green River in Utah; when they hit Seattle, they liked to have dinner in the restaurant at the top of the Space Needle.

Husband-and-wife teams like the Barneses aren’t uncommon. The arrangement allows them to spell each other during 10-hour days on the road and affords a degree of togetherness that wouldn’t be possible if one stayed home.

On the other hand, Wisconsin-based Patricia Rauschnot, a 32-year veteran of the road, has a truck of her own and drives it solo, though she sometimes travels in tandem with her husband, who also has a truck. She got her sister driving 14 years ago and once bumped into her at a motel in St. Louis.

Rauschnot has taken her children and grandchildren on runs that end at Disneyland (so transportation for the vacation is virtually free). She and other female drivers I talked to say that some well-behaved little ones do just fine in a truck, where the seats are high and the views unimpeded. Women in Trucking recently reported on a woman who home-schools her two boys in the cab of her truck, using a laptop computer and purchased curricula.

When Rauschnot and Barnes started driving three decades ago, they were oddities. But their reasons for becoming truck drivers weren’t much different from those of women today. The desire for travel and independence is a big part of the lure. But most say they got their truckers’ licenseswhich can take up to a year of course work and practice driving--because female and male truckers have always gotten equal pay for equal work.

A qualified driver employed by a trucking company can expect a starting salary of $30,000 to $35,000 a year, which, according to Mitzi Hanson-Wright, national sales manager of Women in Trucking, increases to as much as $70,000 a year as miles and experience mount up. Drivers who own their own vehicles and lease their services to a trucking company often make more than that, although high fuel prices are hurting owner-operators these days.

Pay aside, trucking is particularly attractive to “women in the second part of their lives, with empty nests,” says Kim Thomas, managing editor of the trucking Web site Layover.com (https://www.layover.com). Some, like Norma Vogel of Eaton, Ohio, are wives of truckers who got their licenses and hit the road with their husbands as soon as their children were grown. Vogel started when she was about 40 and drove for 15 years, recently taking a desk job with Chattanooga, Tenn.-based U.S. Xpress Enterprises. I found that to be a fairly common move among the women I spoke to. There’s less stress in the office, Vogel says, although the pay is not as good.

Vogel acknowledges that “it’s hard to be a wife and mother on the road.” The parents and siblings of women truckers often help take up the slack with child rearing. And single women have found that the away-from-home time that trucking requires can put a chill on romantic relationships.

Many truck stops have finally added women’s bathrooms and showers, and in the last 10 to 15 years, prejudice against women in the male-dominated industry has abated somewhat. Still, women drivers are sometimes subject to unwelcome sexual overtures from male drivers on their radios, which is partly why Cheri Chambers of Jerome, Idaho, who drove for 25 years, says that trucking is “still a man’s world.”

Moreover, it’s a job, not a vacation, and truckers seldom have time to be tourists. For instance, Tracy Petering, a former driver who writes a column for Layover.com, says she came within a few miles of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis but didn’t get to visit it.

Managing editor Thomas points to other drawbacks: low back pain, carpal-tunnel syndrome, unhealthy eating (after driving for 10 hours, would you visit the salad bar or order a burger and fries?), and the same dangers that plague male truckers and motorists on the open road. Pro driver Rauschnot advises female drivers to avoid rest areas, which are often prowled by thieves, and to close the vents in their vehicles when they nap at truck stops, to avoid being chloroformed and robbed.

These days, many rigs have spacious cabs with all the conveniences of top-of-the-line motor homes: swivel chairs, comfy bunks, refrigerators and microwave ovens. Driver Hogeland, who clearly cares about aesthetics, has a purple 18-wheeler with a custom-designed purple interior.

Layover.com’s Thomas says it takes a special woman to be a long-haul truck driver--someone who’s “independent, comfortable with herself, self-disciplined, patient and flexible.” And Hogeland says, “Truck driving isn’t a job; it’s a lifestyle.”

Still, it pleases me to think there are more and more women out there on the open road, gate-crashing in a male-dominated profession and proving that it’s as much a woman’s world as it is a man’s.