“GOOD DRIVING,” ALICE RAMSEY told the press, “Is all above the neck.” By that, the 22-year-old New Jerseyan and mother of two meant that gender played no role in one’s ability to operate an automobile. This would, hopefully, seem like common sense in 2018. In 1909, however, it was far from a foregone conclusion.
Ramsey herself was qualified to make such a statement because she was one of the early adoptees of the automobile. Her husband, politician and businessman John Ramsey, had purchased her a Maxwell runabout the year before, and she was an instant devotee of “automobubbling,” in the parlance of the time. By September 1908, she was sufficiently confident behind the wheel to take part in an American Automobile Association endurance race to Montauk Point, New York.
It…