Mobilizing Women In a Few Easy Steps! (A Feminist Triptych)

Abstract

This video explores how two or more women portrayed pseudonymous travel experts simultaneously as if their characters were real: Shell Oil’s mid-twentieth-century Women’s Travel Director, Carol Lane, and her counterpart at Trans World Airlines’ (TWA), Mary Gordon, were both “living trademarks.” Two films – Women Mean Business! (1950, Shell) and Let’s Fly to Europe (1956, TWA) – presented Lane and Gordon on film as experts to audiences for the first time.