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

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