After the wave of popular applause for the column posted hereintofore on the history of the Mother-in-law Joke (did I say “wave”? I meant “trickle”. Okay, maybe a comment from one drip.) I thought we might consider the postcard history of a younger old joke. We are going to consider Women Drivers.
This gag, which assumes that women are horrible drivers, is fairly rare on postcards, at least on those which come to me. I frequently find women at the wheel of a car without any sign that they are about to hit somebody, run over somebody, or otherwise commit vehicular mayhem. My inventory does not include every comic card ever printed, but I have missed hardly any of the bestsellers. And the lady who cannot drive is pretty much absent.
Now, the automobile and the postcard grew up together though, being cheaper, the postcard was a lot more popular. Crummy driving is a frequent theme, though more often the culprit is male. Note that the lady driving here is merely an innocent bydriver.
Part of the reason is that it was the postcard’s job to observe, and usually laugh at, anything new and different. And in the very earliest days of the automobile, as the humorous cards point out, EVERYBODY who drove a car was a bad driver. The marvel was that the horseless buggy moved at all; knowing what to do with it once it was zipping along at six miles an hour came later. At this point, women were there to encourage men to buy pretty postcards and tuck them somewhere on the desk for daydreaming at work.
Except for those greasy chaps in their home workshops, automobiles were the plaything of the rich and fashionable. There ARE stories at this time about men AND women getting a car simply because they thought they looked good in the automobile outfit. There were no Women Driver Jokes on postcards because there were no Women Driver Jokes in society. The automobile itself, a noisy novelty, was the joke.
Until the general populace had cars, which did not happen until CEOs like Henry Ford decided to mine the gold to be found in middle class pockets, there was no point. There wasn’t enough traffic to carry much automobilic humor. Plenty of jokes about car accidents, yes: it only takes one driver for that.
So the Woman Driver Joke had to rely on a) enough people being able to afford a car (or at least the down payment) and b) enough people on the road to make a postcard company realize more of the potential customers were driving than not. It took the inter-war years, with the rise of interstates, motels (“motor hotels” for travelers in cars), and use of postcards as what customers sent home while driving out on vacation for the Women Driver Joke to start catching on.
It is then, according to Women Driver Joke scholar Michael L. Berger, that people told the gags, perceiving the woman behind the wheel as a shift in society’s norms. Oh, there had been complaints earlier, when women took to bicycles: finding pleasure in being outside the house could be seen as a threat to domestic perfection. Even then, there were plenty of self-appointed experts (yes, we had those even BEFORE the Interwebs) who announced that getting outdoors was healthy and actually GOOD for the busy housewife.
Postcards artists were not shy about ridiculing other things which took the lady of the house outdoors: social clubs, voting, and so forth. But the possibility that men did not like to see their women driving almost always eluded caricature.
But even as the Women Driver Joke became, in the eyes of twenty-first century commentators, a Tool of the Patriarchy, postcard artists were not one hundred percent convinced. By mid-century, there were only minor hints that men might be better drivers because they drove more often, and, as in the previous postcard, preferred to drive. And still there were men hinted they were perfectly willing to let the lady get behind the wheel.
For various and sundry reasons. The Woman Driver just did NOT get the comic postcard approval enjoyed by the Mother-In-Law. (In our next thrilling episode, however….)
