Anyone hoping to find proof of gender bias in industrial design need look no further than the car. As automotive design is a predominantly male field, cars have mostly been designed by men for decades in the expectation that they will be used by their own gender, using crash test dummies in the shape of archetypal male bodies to test the safety features.
As a result, the controls are often too big, clunky, and wrongly positioned for women or anyone else smaller than an average cis-male to use efficiently, thereby raising the risk of accidents, injuries, and deaths. Not that this is new, as one enthusiastic female motorist raised the alarm about all these problems over a century ago. Starting in 1920, Dorothée Pullinger—a French-born, Scotland-based would-be car designer—devoted several years to developing the Galloway, a nippy, stylish car intended to be driven by women.
The Galloway’s launch caused a sensation, and over four thousand vehicles were sold. But the manufacturer stopped production in 1928, convinced that it was impossible to make as much money from selling cars to women as to men. Dispirited, Dorothée abandoned automotive design, and cars have continued to be designed predominantly by and for men ever since.
Even so, her achievement in designing and manufacturing a car in 1920s Britain was astonishing, not least as, a century later, automotive design is still an overwhelmingly male domain. Dorothée would never have had the opportunity to do it if not for her father, a successful car designer who, after she left school in 1910, gave her an engineering apprenticeship at the car factory he ran. (Initially he was reluctant to do so, but her mother persuaded him to concede.)
Four years later, Dorothée felt confident enough to apply to join the Institution of Automobile Engineers (IAE), only to be rejected on the grounds that “the word ‘person’ means a man and not a woman.” During World War I, she had the chance to demonstrate her leadership skills by managing some seven thousand female workers, many of them refugees, at a munitions factory. When the war ended in 1918, the IAE finally accepted her as its first female member.
By then Dorothée was developing ideas for a car that would be easier and safer for women to drive than existing models. Realizing that most women tended to be too short to see over car dashboards and to push the brake pedals down to the floor, she raised the brakes and the driver’s seat, lowered the dashboard, and made the steering wheel smaller, while adding wing and rearview mirrors to enable the driver to see all four corners of the car. Equally enthusiastic about publicizing her design, Dorothée drove everywhere in the Galloway and entered various races, winning the Scottish Six Day Trials event in 1924. As so many of the workers in the Galloway’s factory were women, she chose the promotional slogan: “Built by ladies, for those of their own sex.”
The decision to stop production must have been heartbreaking for her. Yet ever pragmatic, she looked for a new area of design engineering that was ripe for innovation, and found it in the very different field of commercial laundries. Having begun by opening a mechanized laundry in Croydon, a city south of London, in 1928, Dorothée built it up into a seventeen-strong chain. During World War II, she took on an official role as a member of the Industrial Panel of the Ministry of Production, yet again the first and only woman to do so.
After the war, Dorothée sold the laundry business and moved with her family to Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between Britain and France. Among her greatest pleasures until she died in 1986 at the age of ninety-two, was to drive her beloved Galloway, one of the few surviving models, around Guernsey’s picturesque coastal roads at high speed and with great aplomb.
Alice Rawsthorn is a London-based writer on design. Her books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life published by Hamish Hamilton, Design as an Attitude published by JRP|Ringier, and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli and published by Phaidon. She and Antonelli are co-founders of the Design Emergency podcast.
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