Twenty-eight years after 39-year-old Bertha Benz became the first person to complete a long-distance trip by automobile, two women set out to put a bit more mileage on their car – 10,700 miles, to be exact – in the United States and advocate for the American woman’s right to vote in the process.
It was 1916, the middle of World War I. Henry Ford’s Model T had been introduced eight years earlier. Most women were considered unworthy to be in the driver’s seat, even in their own home. Detroit’s Saxon Motor Car Company – the nation’s eighth largest auto maker at the time – rolled out a small $395 car touted as, “Easy enough for a woman to drive.”
The U.S. auto industry was in its infancy. It was a time of few gas stations, road maps, repair shops, roadside lodging or restaurants and unreliable weather forecasts. Long before the creation of the highway system, there were more than gender gaps in the road; unpaved thoroughfares presented wagon ruts, fallen trees, rocks, dust, mud, flooding and rubbish…