Danica Never Had it so Tough

By Patricia Lee Yongue

The history of women in auto racing in the United States is just beginning to emerge--and still only in fits and starts. The research is difficult, most information, and most of that scant, buried in small town newspaper archives and presumably in as yet inaccessible private correspondence and journals. Racing history books pay little, if any attention, to women racers. There is a history to that history.

The ill fated Speederettes line up for a PR photo at Stockton, prior to the AAA's All-Woman Race.

From auto racing's inception, American women had shown an eagerness to race and had entered competitions with men such as the Glidden Race as well as participated in touring races and reliability runs sponsored by the women’s auto clubs popular especially on the East and West Coasts. These intrepid women loved the speed, the control, the technology, and they did not even mind the noise and dirt. But in 1909, the American Automobile Association initiated its ban on women in sanctioned competition. New Yorker Joan Newton Cuneo's February 1909 appearance in the Mardi Gras races in New Orleans--exhibition races in which she set an amateur record in a Knox-Giant and a feature race in which Ralph De Palma raced his Fiat-Cyclone to a record--was perhaps woman's final official race participation. Joan balked at the AAA’s prohibition of her entry in the National Stock Chassis competition in Lowell, Massachusetts, in August 1909.

During World War I, the AAA suspended racing altogether, but women took this opportunity to get back into the race car driver’s seat and organized all-women races. Once the AAA resumed activity, women were restricted to these privately sponsored all-women races and to record breaking runs, match races with male and female racers, and daredevil stunts. The novelty events, but sometimes even the all-women races, were exhibitions that preceded the scheduled regular races. Press coverage was often flamboyant but always minimal, usually confined to hyperbolic pre-race releases promoting the main contest. “The World Champion Woman Auto Racer” became ubiquitous at state and county fairs.

Despite and perhaps ultimately because of their marginal participation in racing, women, no less than men, were vulnerable to catastrophic racing/stunt mishaps and fatalities. Post-race newspaper and magazine accounts of women’s events appeared generally only if a woman was involved in a sensational crash and/or died. Preaching against (for such abounded) and jokes about women drivers aside, women crashing or dying in race cars was news. At a time when racing in America was moving away from its pre-World War I status as a rich boy's skylarking to a profession for the more ordinary born, women racers were still primarily wealthy heiresses or society wives (or both) who raced only occasionally. When these socially prominent ladies suffered a major accident or died as a result of racing, newspapers had double reason to take notice.