“The Woman at the Wheel”: Marketing Ideal Womanhood, 1915–1934

Abstract

What changes a dozen years have wrought in motoring! proclaims a 1915 Scribner's Magazine article extolling engineering and mechanical advances that made it possible for to take wheel in ever-increasing numbers. Now, essay continues, we see driving motor-cars for all world as if they belonged at wheel. Young girls, most of them hardly out of their teensthey meet you everywhere, garbed in duster and gauntlets, manipulating gears and brakes assurance of veterans. Not always in little lady cars, either. If you visited last summer a resort blessed good roads, whether East or West, you saw sixes of patrician fame and railroad speed, Big Sister sitting coolly at wheel, pausing at post-office on their way for a country spin. And you wondered if callow youth seated beside competent pilot would ever have gumption to handle a real car himself! (214) Although advent of motorized, mechanized and mass-produced personal transportation occurred almost concurrently women's quest for suffrage in United States, what not coincidental impact each movement upon other. Henry Adams posited in Education of Henry Adams (1901) that the typical American man hand on a lever and eye on a curve in road and his living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred. Still, according to Adams' lament, He could not run machine and a woman too; he must leave her, even though wife, to find her and all world saw her trying to find her way by imitating him (445). Robert Grant, writing in Scribner's Magazine in 1916 explicitly notes that woman indeed, found her own way, and that her progress was seemingly unstoppable. The position of modern woman, Grant declares, is parallel to that of automobile; we meet her at every turn and, whether we like her or not, if we get in way we are likely to be run over (742). Some of first major sociological studies to examine impact of new technologies on social structure-such as President Hoover's Commission of Social Trends and Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown studies, credited car, according to cultural historian Gerald Silk, with greatly expanding roles of women by freeing them from home and providing opportunities to increase their outside social contacts (95). Nowhere this influential exchange between automobile industry and roles and expectations of more apparent than in automobile advertisements that appeared in popular magazines during early decades of twentieth century. As Cecilia Tichi writes in Shifting Gears, the burgeoning, successful American magazines like Cosmopolitan, Harper's Weekly, Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, and Literary Digest brought images of technological values and accomplishments into middle-class American living rooms weekly and monthly (19). By early 1910s, according to Tad Burness, these popular magazines had apparently become one of two most effective means of conveying motormaker's message to public (26). Analysis of these advertisements yields a variety of advertising techniques, clever and not-so-clever writing, stylish photographs and clear differences in both appearance and written message depending upon for whom ad was intended. These obvious differences in advertisements are important not only as artifacts of young automobile industry or historical documents of print advertising. Given that they appear at same time that U.S. woman suffrage movement was causing tumult traditional sex and gender expectations, message of advertisements becomes even more pronounced, and contrary to sociological studies that interpreted auto's positive influence on women. Instead, male-dominated automobile and advertising industries created ideal woman by reinforcing same traditional sex and gender roles that much of society feared been irretrievably lost en route to women's enfranchisement in 1920. …