On the Road - 10
Studebaker Corporation
New skyway styling: Studebaker champion
South Bend, Indiana: Studebaker Corp., 1945
Advertising brochure for the new Studebaker Champions. Cover features a woman modeling by the vehicle (“Alluring new colorings and smartly tailored upholstery and fine fittings grace the interiors of these new Champions”) and mirrors the women featured in the pictures. The Studebaker Champion was an automobile produced by the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana, from 1939-1958.
DeGolyer Library, Pamphlet Collection, TL215.S77 S836 1945
Tucker Corporation
The Tucker motor car: the first completely new car in fifty years
[United States]: [Tucker Corporation?], [1948?]
“A Word to Women to drive or ride: The Tucker is built with women’s own particular needs in mind. When you drive, you frequently have children in the car. Tucker safety features give you the EXTRA protection that means peace of mind in traffic and on the highway…You’ll glory in the effortless ease of driving the new Tucker.”
DeGolyer Library, Pamphlet Collection, TL215.T83 T83
Buick Magazine
Flint, Michigan: Buick Motor Division, General Motors Corp.
Volume 11, No. 7, January 1950
Issue of Buick Magazine featuring a woman driving a car through the mountains. Buick and General Motors used women in advertising the beauty and fashion of their vehicles. The article, “Buick’s the Fashion for 1950,” pictures a woman standing next to a new car, while another article, “A Thing Called Thoughtfulness,” features a woman testing the vehicle, implying there is a feminine beauty to its interior.
DeGolyer Library, Pamphlet Collection, TL215.B84 B85 1950
Buick Magazine
Flint, Michigan: Buick Motor Division, General Motors Corp.
Volume 12, No. 2, August 1950
Issue of Buick Magazine featuring a family on vacation taking in the views of a waterfall. This issue of the magazine highlights the motor vehicle as a tool for the family vacation. “Vacation time (and all year ‘round) it’s BUICK for carefree motoring.”
DeGolyer Library, Pamphlet Collection, TL215.B84 B85 1950
Caroline Iverson Ackerman (1918-2012)
Carol Lane’s vacation dress-o-graph: how to plan your travel wardrobe
[New York]: Shell Oil Company, 1953
The women’s travel director of Shell Oil presents “a practical guide for a packable, versatile two-week wardrobe.” This flap book contains pages split in the middle so one can create, with the flaps, an array of different combinations of clothes. ‘Carol Lane’ was the pseudonym of Caroline Iverson Ackerman, who was hired by Shell. She founded the company’s first program for public relations for women, based on family automobile touring. Ackerman worked for Shell Oil Company from 1947 to 1950, as the first “Carol Lane, Women’s Travel Director of Shell Touring Bureau.” The pseudonym was also adopted by others, including Madeline B. Brown (1931-2013).
DeGolyer Library, Pamphlet Collection, G150 .L36 1953
U.S. 54 National Headquarters
Travel Route US 54
[Santa Rosa, N.M.]: US 54 National Headquarters, 1954
“Travel Route 54: The Open Door to the Great West.” Small advertising brochure touting U.S. 54 as the safe family highway. The route offered automobilist a “scenic…historic… pleasant route to and through vacation land.” Stretching across six states, U.S. 54 offered the shortest route from Chicago to the West; the only “completely diagonal highway that is crossed by every transcontinental highway.”
DeGolyer Library, Pamphlet Collection, G4051.P2 1954.U54
Mary Otis Davis
The turning point: the diary of a debutante
Dallas: Story Book Press, [c1955]
Mary Otis Davis’ “Totie” describes her debutante visit to California in this piece titled Turning Point. Along with her dad, aunt and uncle, and brother, Mary set out in her family’s black Ford sedan from Boston. She boarded a train heading west to California. Across the miles of her trip and the pages of her account, Mary remembers her father’s words as she set out on her own: “Totie! Keep your wits about you!”
DeGolyer Library, General Collection, CT275.D277
Alice Huyler Ramsey (1886-1983)
Veil, duster and tire iron
Covina, California, 1961
Alice Huyler Ramsey was the first woman to drive an automobile across the United States from coast to coast, a feat she completed on August 7, 1909. Her book provides a description of that automobile trip from New York to San Francisco. The car itself was a dark-green, four-cylinder, 30-horsepower 1909 Maxwell DA, a touring car. “Women can handle an automobile just as well as men.” On October 17, 2000, Ramsey became the first woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
DeGolyer Library, General Collection, E168 .R26
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon (1894-1982)
Alice in Lark land
[South Bend, Ind.: Studebaker Corporation, 1962?]
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon is recognized as one of the most successful retail ad makers in advertising. In 1954 Fitz-Gibbon started her own retail advertising agency and by the early 1950s, was reported to be the highest paid woman in advertising. She was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1981. Alice in Lark land is a story of one woman’s love affair with her new Lark and its many features. “Without a car…a woman is a prisoner in her own home…all dressed up and no way to go!”
DeGolyer Library, Ephemera Collection, Advertising Fiction/Poetry AUTOMOBILES Studebaker
Virginia Scharff
Taking the wheel: women and the coming of the motor age
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, [1992]
The twentieth-century rise of the automobile collided head on with Victorian prescriptions for the proper role and place of women in society. Gender conventions cast women as too weak, dependent, and flighty to manage the fiery motored beast. Overcoming that stereotype was as difficult for women as gaining access to the vote, the professions, and education, yet their personal feats of driving in both war and peace demolished the gender barriers against their taking the road. After women proved once and for all that they could drive under the worst conditions in World War I, they adapted the automobile to their domestic roles in urban society during the 1920s. Virginia Scharff is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History at the University of New Mexico.
DeGolyer Library, General Collection, TL152.52 .S3 1992
Peter John Blodgett, editor (1954- )
Motoring West: Automobile Travelers in the trans-Mississippi West, 1900-1950
Norman, Oklahoma: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2015
Motoring West presents a wide range of auto touring narratives from the beginning of the automobile age through the Second World War. It illuminates the similarities and differences in the ways that men and women engaged both the automobile and the many Wests that they encountered in their travels.
DeGolyer Library, General Collection, GV1024 .M9125