According to Jersey girl Alice Huyler Ramsey, “Good driving has nothing to do with sex. It’s all above the collar.” Born in 1886 and a Vassar grad when fewer than 7% of women went to college, she got her first car in 1908 and went on to become an inspiration for future women race car drivers.
A year later, at age 22, she made history as the first female cross-country motorist. The trip took 59 days and covered 3,800 miles. Ramsey took to driving like a duck to water, clocking 6,000 miles on dirt roads near her Hackensack home before entering a 200-mile endurance drive to and from Montauk, NY, earning a perfect score and taking the bronze medal.
‘Even a woman’
An agent from Maxwell auto company spotted her and proposed a daring publicity stunt: an all-expense-paid trip if she proved that a Maxwell could take anyone — even a woman driver — across America.
After learning basic car safety, Ramsey set out with two sisters-in-law and a 16-year-old friend, none of whom could drive. Decked out in hats and goggles, with dusters protecting their long dresses from road grime, they stayed in hotels, ate in restaurants, picnicked by the roadside and grabbed what they could at small stores along the way.
Gauntlet of mechanical challenges
It was on a stretch of the Cleveland Highway that Ramsey set her personal best with a blazing speed of 42 miles/hour. Along the way the group changed blown tires; repaired a brake; cleaned spark plugs; ran out of gas; cooled an overheated transmission with water carried from a roadside ditch in a toothbrush holder; bounced over potholes and ruts; and slid along muddy roads on tread-less tires.
She later drove five of the six passes of the Swiss Alps, giving up the last trip only under doctor’s orders because of her pacemaker.
They finally arrived in California to be met with the San Francisco Chronicle headline, “Pretty Women Motorists Arrive After Trip Across the Continent.” Ramsey returned home by train, raised two children and wrote a memoir.
30+ cross-country trips
She never lost her love of the road, completing at least 30 more cross-country drives before losing count and only ever getting one ticket for an illegal U-turn.
She later drove five of the six passes of the Swiss Alps, giving up the last trip only under doctor’s orders because of her pacemaker.
Alice Huyler Ramsey died in 1983. She was the first woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame; was named Woman Motorist of the Century; and earned a place in the Notable Dames Database, where her occupation was listed as “daredevil.”