Yet at the same time, Owen John cried that motoring had “shortened their skirts and docked their hair, invented the flapper [a trendy, fun-loving young woman] as well as the flapper-bracket [the motorcycle pillion] and, worst of all, proved that women can be just as forward as men in the matter of driving”.
Editor Hugo Massac Buist wasn’t impressed, mind you: “It has been the fashion among certain writers on motoring to express openly or insinuate that the great majority of women drivers are more daring than skilful, to put it politely. With this contention we cannot agree.”
And he was proved right by the stats: all things being equal, men should have had 7.3 times as many crashes as women, yet it was 12.5 times in reality, we found in the 1930s. (Such a disparity, by the way, has continued to this day.)
Such bashing faded from our pages (if not common opinion) in the 1970s, but then motoring ads started centring more on gender roles and sex. “If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched,” boasted Fiat. “If this lady were a car, she’d run you down,” spat back a graffito.
Thankfully, this trend faded fast into the 1980s – whether due to feminist ideas becoming more accepted, more women getting their licences or women entering the workforce en masse, while we stopped publishing motor show pieces in which female writers focused on pretty colours, ease of parking and space for a pram.