Pink Cars and Pocketbooks : How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver’s Seat, by Jessica A. Brockmole

Abstract

“Woman’s Place is in the Home Ford!”, a 1949 Ford Motor Company advertisement proclaimed. The ad shows that, while women were advertised to, the automobile industry used gendered marketing not only to sell the cars themselves, but also to perpetuate ideas about womanhood. Automakers were certain they knew what women valued and what kind of relationship they had with cars, and they stuck with these assumptions for much of the twentieth century. Jessica A. Brockmole’s book Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver’s Seat questions these assumptions and examines women’s relationship with cars and automotive marketing from the early 1900s to 1970s. Rather than simply attributing the construction of the gendered, reductive stereotypes to an American society concerned about the greater mobility and independence granted by the automobile, she argues for a gradual marginalization based on the automobile industry’s (mis)understanding of its female consumers....