Looking back at women who shaped the auto industry

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While we don’t need it to be International Women’s Day to celebrate our writers or women in the automotive industry, it is a day for women to speak up and have their stories told, so we asked our female contributors to write the stories they wanted to write.

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I expected Stephanie to write about racing, Lorraine to write about shopping advice, Jil to write about old cars and Nadine to write about women in the industry.

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Looking back at women who shaped the auto industry Back to video

Instead, Jil wanted to write about shopping advice; Stephanie about women in the industry; Nadine about a racer-stunt-woman; and Lorraine, well, Lorraine just wanted to write about herself (I kid, I kid). And then “Motor Mouth” David Booth felt he had to get in the mix and tell you just how awesome these writers are, too.

We all know women often face different challenges than their male counterparts, so here’s a chance to give them the podium and do what they do best: write about cars and the people that drive them, build them and buy them. —Ed.

Most of those who shaped the automobile’s history were men, but they weren’t alone. It was a woman’s job, too, and while they seldom got the same recognition, they were just as essential.

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We’ve rounded up some of the designers, engineers, inventors and adventurers who made a difference over the years.

Mimi Vandermolen

Vandermolen joined Ford’s Design Studio in 1970. She was the first full-time female designer the company had hired since firing its last in 1948. Those women had been temporarily employed in place of male workers who’d gone to war.

She was born in the Netherlands but raised in Toronto, and was the first female student in the Ontario College of Art and Design’s industrial design program. At Ford, her training involved helping with exterior and interior design on the 1974 Mustang II. After working on full-size sedans, she led the 1986 Taurus interior design team.

With the Taurus, Vandermolen improved Ford’s seats and developed new ergonomic controls. She used dials for climate functions, created buttons with bumps to better indicate if they were on or off, and design a curved dash where the switches were easier to reach. She was later promoted to all North American small-car exterior and interior design, a first for a woman, and took the 1993 Ford Probe from start to finish. It was a joint project with Mazda and she spent a year in Japan with engineers who worked to her specifications on the car.

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Bertha Benz

Most historians credit Karl Benz with creating the first successful automobile — but it’s likely he’d never have made the history books, had his wife not taken it on the world’s first long-distance drive.

Bertha shared Karl’s enthusiasm. She started a company for him with some of her family’s wealth so he could focus on his car, and often worked alongside him in the shop. But investors doubted the car’s ability, and Karl was ready to give up.

On an August morning in 1888, Bertha left Karl a note as he slept, and, with two of their sons, set out on a twelve-hour 100-kilometre trip to visit her family. She stopped in every town and made sure the local newspapers knew, and by the time she finished the return trip – taking a different route so even more people would see it – the car was famous. Karl built and sold 25 copies of it and then developed new models, and by 1899 their auto company was the world’s largest.

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The “Damsels of Design”

GM design chief Harley Earl knew customers as well as cars, and in the 1950s, realized women were making decisions in the showroom. He believed women could design for women, and in 1955 he assembled a team he called the “Damsels of Design.”

The women hated the name, and GM described them as decorators rather than designers, but they’re considered the industry’s first all-female design team. Most came from GM’s interior design department, while others were industrial designers at Frigidaire, the appliance division GM owned.

The team primarily worked on show car concepts, but some of their ideas made their way to production vehicles, including retractable seat belts, storage consoles, illuminated mirrors, and child safety door locks. But women were still rare in the industry. When Earl retired in 1958, his successor thought his male designers shouldn’t have to work alongside women, and the team was out.

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Suzanne Vanderbilt, one of two who stayed at GM, remained for 23 years and rose to the position of senior designer. She worked on Cadillac and Chevrolet styling, and developed and patented an inflatable seat back that became the lumbar support.

Helene Rother

Born in Germany in 1908, Helene Rother was a jewellery and fashion designer in Paris prior to the Second World War. She fled the city with her young daughter during the Nazi occupation, and ended up in New York in 1941. She was working as a comic book illustrator when she saw an ad for an interior designer at General Motors. A newspaper called her the first female auto designer in Detroit, and her $600-a-month salary was more than most men were paid.

In 1947 she left to open her own studio, and Nash, an independent automaker, became a client. Nash soon became known for the quality and design of the award-winning interiors Rother created for it, and other automakers dropped their stodgy interiors for Rother’s style of bright, modern cabins. She represented Nash and GM at the 1951 Paris Auto Show, and was the first woman to speak at a conference of the Society of Automotive Engineers.

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Nash merged with Hudson in 1954 to create American Motors, and Rother moved on to other clients, including Goodyear and Magnavox. Her last automotive work was for Miller-Meteor, which made ambulances and hearses. She will be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame later this year.

Dorothée Pullinger

Born in France in 1894, Pullinger was the daughter of a car designer who moved the family to Scotland for his job as manager for the Arroll-Johnston automobile. Fascinated by cars, Pullinger applied to the Institution of Automobile Engineers, but it only admitted men. During the First World War she was put in charge of 7,000 employees at a munitions plant. Based on that record, the Institution accepted her as its first female member after the war.

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Arroll-Johnston created a division called Galloway Motors in 1921, and Pullinger became its manager. Along with her father, she designed a small, light car to appeal to women, with a smaller steering wheel and higher seat than most cars, and with its gearshift and brake levers positioned so they wouldn’t catch on skirts. It was also one of the first cars with a rearview mirror as standard equipment. Most of the factory employees building the car were female, and Pullinger opened a women’s engineering college to train them.

But very few early auto companies enjoyed lasting success, and the Galloway was no exception. It closed in 1928. Pullinger worked for a while in sales at Arroll-Johnston, later set up an automatic laundry business, and following the Second World War, was the sole female consultant on industrial practices for the government’s Ministry of Production. She was also the first woman inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame.

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Mary Anderson

Mary Anderson didn’t drive, but she invented the windshield wiper. Visiting New York in 1902, she watched a streetcar driver open the window in a storm in order to see. Anderson came up with a rubber blade on a spring-loaded arm, operated by a crank handle inside the car, to clean the windshield. She tried to interest investors, including in Canada, but there were no takers. The patent expired before automakers starting using wipers, and Anderson made nothing on her invention.

Another inventor, Charlotte Bridgwood – who was also a stage actress – patented an electric wiper design in 1917, using rollers instead of blades. It too was unsuccessful and the patent expired without any automakers picking up on it.

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But the story doesn’t end there. Bridgwood’s daughter Florence Lawrence, a popular movie actress, was also an inventor. At a time when cars didn’t have turn signals or brake lights, Lawrence created a switch-activated arm on the bumper that indicated a turn, and a sign that flipped up when the driver hit the brakes. But she didn’t patent either one, and got nothing for her ideas either.

Alice Ramsey

Horses were the main method of transportation in the early 20 ^th century, but Alice Ramsay didn’t like them. So her husband bought her a 1908 Maxwell, which she promptly drove in an endurance race. That caught the eye of Carl Kelsey, Maxwell’s sales manager.

In 1903, auto enthusiast Dr. Horatio Jackson became the first person to drive across the country. Maxwell wanted to appeal to female buyers, and Kelsey thought a woman making the same trip would be good publicity for the car.

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Maxwell paid expenses and supplied a brand-new touring car. Ramsey, 22, took along her two sisters-in-law and a friend, but she did all the driving. On June 9, 1909, the four women left Manhattan and headed west. It was a 5,800-kilometre trip, and only 245 km of that was on paved roads. They changed flat tires, pushed the car through muddy trails, and dipped water out of ditches to fill the radiator. Fifty-nine days later, a crowd cheered their arrival in San Francisco.

It was just a warmup: Ramsey drove across the U.S. more than thirty times, and in her later years drove five of the six passes over the Swiss Alps — and only on her doctor’s orders did she reluctantly stop trying for the sixth.