WOMEN PIONEERS | Alice Huyler Ramsey

Alice Huyler Ramsey, pioneer driver, 1909. Photo:
 Library of Congress and Smithsonian Magazine.

June 9, 2020—This day, in 1909, Alice Huyler Ramsey set off in the rain from New York City for San Francisco in a Maxwell 30 automobile.

She was determined to become the first woman to drive across the United States. She traveled with three other women, none of whom knew how to drive!

Just over five feet, 22 years old, she posed next the car with her rubber helmet and visor in the rain until she got tired of the umbrella-toting cameramen. She kissed her husband goodbye and cranked the motor to start up the car.

Alice Ramsey and team first stopped at Poughkeepsie, according to the Vassar Alumnae Magazine. She was two years out of Vassar, two years ahead of Inez Milholland, and had a comfortable stop at her alma mater before proceeding across country on the so-called highways of the day. It was the month that Inez Milholland made her famous graveyard speech at Vassar. At graduation, the President of Vassar confided to Inez's father about his daughter: "Wonderful girl, Inez. I'm glad she's gone."

The four women in the car wore ponchos to keep themselves dry. Their touring car was a dark-green, four-cylinder, 30-HP Maxwell DA, with two bench seats and a removable pantasote roof.

Two men laid the groundwork for her trip:

• Her husband, John Rathbone Ramsey, decided to purchase a car for his wife when her horse was spooked by one. Ramsey found she enjoyed driving around the mostly dirt roads near her Hackensack, New Jersey, home.
• Then she entered a 200-mile endurance drive across Long Island to Montauk and back and an unidentified representative of automaker Maxwell-Briscoe Company saw her driving and was impressed. He proposed an expense-paid trip in a 1909 Maxwell, courtesy of the company,  if she would drive the other direction, across the country (but not back again; she took the train).

It all happened and she and her crew of three spent nights at hotels, eating restaurant food and an occasional home-cooked meal. They defied the advice of doctors, who warned that it was dangerous for women even to ride in cars because at 20 miles an hour it would overstimulate them. In fact, when the women got to the Cleveland Highway in Ohio they attained "the terrific speed" of 42 miles per hour with no ill effects. Ramsey fixed at least one tire blowout by then and had called for a mechanic to repair a coil in Syracuse, waiting near their car as someone in the crowd cried “Get a horse!” Altogether they went through 11 spare tires.

In the Midwest, the car ran out of gas. The women had forgotten to check the specially enlarged 20-gallon tank frequently enough. Some muddy roads proved practically impassable for the tread-less tires. At one point the women had to sleep beside an overflowed creek until the water receded. They took 13 days to go 360 miles, being towed by horses from time to time.

There were no road signs then. Ramsey relied on the Blue Book series of automotive guides, which gave directions using landmarks, but sometimes the route changed. And there were no books for regions west of the Mississippi River.

Unlike Robert Frost, when Ramsey came to a crossroads, she chose the road more traveled by. For example, she followed the roads with telegraph poles “with the greatest number of wires.”

On certain days, the Maxwell-Briscoe Company hired pilot cars familiar with the area to lead them. Even so, the party sometimes hit a dead end at a mine or sandpit and had to backtrack.

Locals rode horses for miles and waited by roadsides for hours to catch a glimpse of the Ramsey team. Only six years had passed since Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson’s 1903 drive marked the first male cross-country success.

They arrived in San Francisco on August 7, 1909. The trip took 59 days, 41 of them driving, and covered 3,800 miles. In 1960, the Automobile Manufacturers Association named her their “First Lady of Automotive Travel” for her trek across a “trackless land.”

Ramsey outlived Maxwell-Briscoe, which was absorbed in 1926 by Chrysler. She lived on to 1983. She was the first woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, in 2000. Her book about the trip was called Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron (1961). An abbreviated story from the book was printed in the Smithsonian Magazine on the centennial of the cross-country drive.

Other women pioneers in automobile history include Mary Dickerman Woodin, mother of William H. Woodin, FDR's first Secretary of the Treasury, who hired my father in 1933 for his first job working at the Farm Credit Administration. Woodin's mother was the first woman to obtain a driver's license in the State of Pennsylvania.

BIRTH | Aug. 6–Inez Milholland is 130 (Updated Aug. 25, 2016)

Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886-1916)

This day in 1886, in Brooklyn, N.Y., was born Inez Milholland Boissevain, who gave her life working to persuade President Wilson to support a U.S. constitutional amendment recognizing the right of women to vote.

Women won the right to vote at the Federal level in 1920, four years after she died.

Milholland was a graduate of Vassar College and NYU Law School who also fought for the rights of working-class women, spoke out for racial equality, and worked for prison reform.

At Vassar, her suffrage meetings were banned from the campus, so she held them across the street at a Poughkeepsie Cemetery.

For six years, she was involved in the drive for Votes for Women in New York, memorably lobbying state lawmakers and leading annual suffrage parades up Fifth Avenue.

In 1913, she fought for the inclusion of black college women in the Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., and she famously led it the wearing a cape and crown atop a white horse.

Inez and Eugen Boissevain, 1913

In July 1913, she married Eugen Boissevain (my mother's uncle) in London, asking her friends to keep it a secret. However, someone called the newspapers and it was front-page news the next day. A New York Times editorial called her "the fairest of the Amazons".

In 1916, she became a “Flying Envoy” on a speaking tour of the western states on behalf of the National Woman's Party. In October 1916, after the rhetorical question, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty,” she collapsed before a large audience in Los Angeles, Calif. She died a month later of pernicious anemia.

On Christmas Day, an unprecedented memorial was held for her in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, the first woman to be honored there.

The following  month, suffragists from the National Woman's Party presenting memorials of Milholland's death were rebuffed by President Wilson. They then began picketing the White House and carried her last words on many of their banners. The picketing led to arrests, imprisonment, hunger strikes, forced feeding, national outrage and a change in President Wilson's mind (not his first). The 19th Amendment was ratified by the last required state (Tennessee) in August 1920.

Inez Milholland Boissevain personified the goal of Votes for Women.