Reviews
A fascinating study of the relationship between women, cars, and American capitalism. From marketing campaigns and showroom design to car maintenance handbooks, Jessica Brockmole shows how women embraced the combustion engine despite numerous marketing schemes that underestimated their abilities to handle and repair vehicles. The overlapping analysis of the auto industry, consumer culture, and American women offers a valuable new contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century America.
Written with the panache of a seasoned author, Pink Cars and Pocketbooks is a meticulously researched and persuasively argued contribution to the histories of women, gender, and consumer culture. Brockmole sheds new light on how American women influenced the highly masculine auto industry and, ultimately, claimed their place in the driver's seat.
If you've ever wondered how automakers so utterly misread women with the introduction of the Dodge La Femme, read this book! In this engaging work of historical scholarship, Jessica Brockmole uncovers how savvy female consumers, through the sharing of automotive knowledge, challenged gender presumptions and took control of their own automotive futures.
Women's love of cars and driving shines through in this colorful consumer history. From Alice Ramsey, who starred in a marketing campaign for Maxwell Motor driving coast to coast, to Charlotte Montgomery, who sold the industry on women's buying power, Brockmole offers a thoughtful history of gender and consumerism.
Pink Cars and Pocketbooks details a compelling history of how biased marketing assumptions led automakers to promote appearance-driven gimmicks for female consumers. Women responded by creating communities to share automotive knowledge. Brockmole explores timely issues of how technologies have been gendered and who has the power to assert technical expertise.
Book Details
Figures
Introduction
1. Igniting
Maxwell-Briscoe Motor Company and the Drive to Market Women
"Good Bye, Horse!": Women and Early Automotive Advertisin
Women at Work and at the Wheel
2. Researching
Finding
Figures
Introduction
1. Igniting
Maxwell-Briscoe Motor Company and the Drive to Market Women
"Good Bye, Horse!": Women and Early Automotive Advertisin
Women at Work and at the Wheel
2. Researching
Finding the Consumer: Early Market Research
Curtis Publishing Company Questions the Dealers: 1914 Automotive Study
Curtis Asks About the Ladies: 1916 Automotive Study
Motoring Women Have Their Say: 1920 and 1932 Automotive Studies
3. Marketing
"LINE Is Everything": Dorothy Dignam and Marketing in the 30s
"All This—and Victory Too!": Wartime Automotive Marketing
4. Selling
"What Makes Women Buy?": Postwar Women and What They Wanted
"Milady Wants Beauty!": The Postwar Auto Industry and What They Gave
"Show Business on Wheels": Selling and Spectacle
5. Communicating
"Six and the Single Girl": Selling Cars to Changing Demographics of Women
"In Woman Language": Automotive Columns and Women's Magazines
"Women Teaching Other Women": Maintaining, Repairing, Understanding Cars
Conclusion