Six Unsung Heroines That Left Their Mark On The Auto Industry

In celebration of International Women’s Day, Aronson Advertising wanted to take a moment to recognize just a few of the women whose contributions to the auto industry were invaluable but you may not know about.

Florence Lawrence

Starting off our list of leading ladies is Florence Lawrence, an actress born in 1886. After witnessing her fair share of traffic accidents while driving, Florence Lawrence realized that many of those accidents were in part due to the fact that drivers had no way of knowing which direction other drivers in front of them were taking. To remedy this frustrating scenario, Lawrence came up with what she called “auto-signaling arms”—an invention that used flags on either side of the car that could be remotely raised and lowered using the push of a button to indicate which direction the car would be turning. While you won’t find flags on vehicles anymore, Florence Lawrence’s invention became the prototype for what we all now know as the modern day turn signal.

Denise McCluggage

An American auto racing driver, journalist, photographer, and author, Denise McCluggage was born in 1927 and spent her life fighting for equality for women in both motorsports and journalism. In the 1950s, she began racing professionally, and in 1961, she won the grand touring category at Sebring in a Ferrari 250 GT. She also had a class win in 1964 in the Monte Carlo Rally driving a Ford Falcon. In 1958, McCluggage helped create and launch Competition Press magazine, now known as Autoweek. After retiring from racing in the late 1960s, McCluggage went back to focusing on journalism full-time, writing several columns for Autoweek and remaining Senior Contributing Editor until her death in May 2015.

Michelle Christenson

Growing fond of automobiles while working on muscle cars with her father as a little girl, Michelle Christenson brought that passion with her when she became the first woman to lead a supercar design team. Christenson joined the Acura team in 2005, and after briefly working for General Motors in 2010, returned to Acura as the Lead Principle Designer of the highly anticipated second generation Honda NSX at Honda Research and Development.

Bertha Benz

Up until 1888, no one had ever travelled any notable distance in a motorized vehicle. In August of that year, though, Bertha Benz completed the world’s first long distance road trip from Mannheim, Germany to Pforzheim, Germany—a whopping 66 miles—in the then-newly constructed Patent Motorwagen automobile. She was, in fact, married to Karl Benz, the inventor of the first automobile, and the Patent Motor Car in which she made her journey garnered enough attention to launch it to success.

Mary Barra

Having spent her entire career holding various positions at General Motors, it couldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone when on January 15, 2014, Mary Barra became the first woman in history to become CEO of a major automobile company, General Motors. Prior to her becoming CEO, Barra had served as the Executive Vice President of Global Product Development, Purchasing and Supply Chain at GM. Her promotion landed her on the cover of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Jean Jennings

As former president and editor of Automobile magazine, and as Good Morning America’s automotive correspondent from 1994 to 2000, Jean Jennings certainly helped pave the way for women in all fields of the auto industry. Starting in 1975, she also worked at Chrysler’s test track as a test driver, welder, and mechanic in the impact lab, and later became the editor for Automotive News. She then spent five years writing for Car and Driver magazine. Nowadays, she is the editor of the automotive blog JeanKnowsCars.com—a website of her own creation that she started to provide a perspective on cars for everyday people.

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