Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat

Since the introduction of the automobile, the American automotive industry has actively courted women. Always desirable as household purchasers, female consumers became an early target of market research into how they shopped for cars and what they looked for in an ideal vehicle. This research showed that women enthusiastically bought and used cars, enjoying the independence, the convenience, and the mobility that they offered. But this feminine embrace of the automobile proved challenging to a society uncomfortable with women using technology and an emerging car culture centered around masculine expertise and work. To assuage that discomfort, the automotive industry sifted through these market research reports and selectively chose data that conformed to their already-held biases about female consumers. Despite women expressing interest in automotive technology and in safety innovations, the auto industry declared that they cared only about paint color and upholstery. Advertisements began reflecting this, showing women using cars as domestic spaces or as stylish accessories rather than as the means to escape and explore.

Women perusing car ads, reading news reports, visiting auto shows, watching television commercials, and viewing the new models in their local dealership saw constant reminders that the auto industry did not listen to them. From the beginning of the twentieth century, women had asked for reliable cars that fit their bodies and clear information about how to use, maintain, and repair them. These demands increased after World War II, as suburban living and postwar spending brought more cars into American garages and more women onto American roads. The auto industry responded with pink cars and gendered marketing appeals. By the 1970s, frustrated women began sharing automotive knowledge themselves, creating a network of teaching and learning that gave them the expertise and the confidence to define their own relationships to automobiles.

“Pink Cars and Pocketbooks” examines the fraught relationship between the automotive industry and female consumers throughout the twentieth century and how, through their purchases and their persistence, women bought their way into the automobile, into masculine car culture, and into an automotive future of their own making.