First Ladies in Electric Cars...in 1904

The future we could be living in...if we weren't afraid of the feminine

In 1904 Edith Bolling Galt became the first woman documented to receive a drivers license for “an automobile of the electric type” in Washington D.C., where she lived. It was the perfect way for a fashionable woman to get around town independently and electric car manufacturers took note. Ladies did not like the dirty, dangerous and unreliable gas-powered cars on the market, but electric cars—with flower vases in the dashboard—were just the thing. Edith was famous for zipping around town and was soon joined by more and more women. 

I had first heard about fancy ladies driving electric cars in a biography of First Lady Edith Wilson (Untold Power: the Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson by Rebecca Boggs Roberts). Before she was first lady, Edith was a wealthy widow with a vibrant social life and an electric car of her own.¹ How fun! I noted it as a fun plot bunny or detail to use in a historical novel (even though I was sure I would get angry reviews calling it historically inaccurate).

And then I thought nothing more of it until I read Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in Economies Built for Men by Katrine Marçal. 

There was a moment in history—in the early 1900s to be exact— where there were many Ediths—lady drivers zipping around town in their electric cars. This was breaking news to me.

Marçal writes that at the turn of the century, more than a third of cars in the US were electric. Unlike gas powered cars of the time, which were messy and dangerous to get started and operate, electric cars were “noiseless, clean, odorless and stylish rigs” from which one did not risk an explosion or their dress catching on fire. They were designed with features specifically for women, like roofs. Because apparently, only women liked to keep dry in the rain when driving.

Charging stations were soon appearing at shopping centers, so the women could charge their car while they shopped and dined with friends. Talk about living your best life. I feel that I must repeat that this is the early 1900s. 

As electric cars were thought to be suitable for ladies, and thus marketed to ladies, they were soon designed for ladies. What with roofs and room for full skirts and crystal vases for flowers on the dashboard. As a result, they became to be seen more and more as feminine. 

Which is really to say, they weren’t manly. And of course men could not drive a feminine car. And so now we are driving our manly gas powered cars straight to the climate apocalypse. Bon voyage!

Marçal describes how the shift took place—from when electric cars were the superior vehicles, when there were “girl” cars and “boy” cars and they were two very separate markets. But it all changed thanks to advertising and marketing and invention—and tragedy.  When Cadillac CEO Henry Leland lost his friend to a gas car startup accident, he and inventor Charles F. Kettering pioneered the use of the electric starter in the gas powered car. You could say this “feminized” the gas car in that it made it more safe and reliable. Marçal writes: “By integrating what had long been perceived as “feminine” values into the gas car, its manufacturers increased the size of the market and took the car from niche product to the object we now see on every drive.” Instead of two markets for cars, there was now just one and it had to be the one that men would be okay with.

Marçal goes on to ask the big question:

Might things have turned out differently had our views on gender been different? A hundred years ago, electric fire engines, taxis and buses roamed many of the world’s major metropolises. Then they disappeared. Instead, gas-powered technology became the dominant form of technology, bringing pollution, noise and odors with it. Had early twentieth-century society not looked down on the electric car as feminine, would history have followed a different track?

I can’t stop thinking about all this. Why did I think electric cars were a recent invention? How did I not know about historical women driving around in electric cars with a crystal vase on the dashboard (and why do I not have this in my car today?). It seems so important to learn about the different paths humanity could have taken—and that nothing is inevitable.

I can’t stop thinking of the world with gas powered firetrucks and buses that we lost. I really can’t stop thinking about it in light of Gov Kathy Hochul’s idiotic decision to “pause” New York City’s badly needed congestion pricing to fund upgrades to climate-friendly transit. I can’t stop thinking about what noise, pollution, and environmental destruction we could collectively avoid if we aren’t afraid of what we believe is feminine.

1. Marçal notes that President Wilson, whom Edith married, feared that electric cars would incite the masses to revolution. Maybe, if we all weren’t stuck in traffic!