Celebrating General Motors’ female pioneers

By Richard Truesdell

| 13 Jun 2025

Classic & Sports Car – The women who changed the face of ’50s American cars

Post-war America was a time of unbridled optimism.

After WW2, with most of Europe and much of Asia lying devastated, the United States emerged as the world’s first superpower.

It was an era during which America’s middle class also fully developed, driven by many returning veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill to attend college (the first generation to do so for most) and buy their first house.

Those starter homes of 1000sq ft or less often had attached garages.

Their new owners, having made sacrifices during the war years, were eager to park a shiny new US-built automobile inside.

Seven of Harley Earl’s recruits were assigned across the five General Motors automotive divisions, from Buick to Pontiac

The remaining independent makers – such as Nash, Studebaker, Packard, Hudson, Kaiser-Frazer and more – were the first to introduce all-new models before 1948.

But in 1949, the Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – countered.

These new cars looked nothing like their warmed-over, pre-war-rooted ’48 models.

The Big Three offered restyles every year, and planned obsolescence motivated hungry buyers to purchase a new car every other year.

America’s consumer economy was truly born, and it propelled the country through decades of unprecedented growth and expansion.

The 1958 Feminine Auto Show provided a canvas for the Damsels of Design’s art, with Ruth Glennie’s Fancy Free Corvette in the foreground

With this as a background, and with a brief slowdown for the 1950-’53 Korean conflict, the Big Three embarked on a brutal price war, and caught in the crossfire were the independents.

Chrysler was the weakest of the market leaders, but as an engineering-focused company it introduced the legendary first-generation Hemi V8.

At Ford, a massive reorganisation was happening in the aftermath of near-bankruptcy in the 1940s.

This resurgence was led by founder Henry Ford’s son, Henry II, known as The Deuce, and a group of senior managers, called the Whiz Kids, led by Robert McNamara.

General Motors, fuelled by profits from its war contracts, was the clear leader.

Four female pioneers contributed to Frigidaire’s innovative appliance design

In 1949 its Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac divisions controlled more than 50% of a domestic marketplace that set an industry record at six million units (Volkswagen sold just two cars in the US that year).

Its domination was so complete that throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s there was talk of anti-trust suits to break up GM.

Even before the outbreak of WW2, GM had reorganised its design and engineering departments.

The progressive Harley Earl saw the need for a new Art and Color Section and designed the industry’s first concept car, the 1937 Buick Y-Job.

Jeanette Linder worked in Chevrolet’s interior studio on the Impala Martinique convertible. Its colour-co-ordinated luggage matched the seat-trim inserts

One of Earl’s earliest recruits was Helene Rother, who joined GM in 1943.

She stayed with the firm until ’47, before moving on to establish her own design company and working with Nash, which merged with Hudson in 1954 to form American Motors Corporation.

Thought to be the first female automotive designer working in the USA, she is at times wrongly grouped in with later hires who would become known as the Damsels of Design.

In 1950, Earl and GM embarked on a fresh way to present its dazzling new models with its Motorama travelling roadshow.

Sandra Longyear with the Pontiac Bonneville Polaris convertible, which featured a compartment for stowing picnic gear

Styling was the hot new product, and no one could display it better than Earl.

As this new selling point grew in importance to GM, he was afforded more scope for what was by then known as the GM Design Department.

In 1955, understanding that women were a key influence in the purchase of new cars, he recruited 11 women from some of America’s most prestigious design schools, including the Pratt Institute in New York.

Within the growing styling department, Earl divided up his new team: seven designers were assigned to the five automotive divisions (Jeanette Linder, Marjorie Ford Pohlman, Ruth Glennie, Peggy Sauer, Sandra Longyear, Suzanne Vanderbilt and Amy Stanley), and four went across to GM’s Frigidaire appliance subsidiary (Dagmar Arnold, Jayne van Alstyne, Jan Krebs and Gere Kavanaugh).

Starting in 1955, on arrival at GM’s Technical Center in Warren, north of Detroit, the team started work on GM’s 1958 products.

Peg Sauer in the Oldsmobile Carousel station wagon that has toy-storage pockets in the back of the front bench

The full-size models for that year were in essence a one-year-only transition from the landmark 1955-’57 ranges and the completely restyled 1959 cars.

Many featured distinctive horizontal tailfins and heavy, overly ornate styling that would, generally, be received negatively.

Exterior styling was left entirely to GM’s male stylists, but the Damsels’ work could be seen in the interior designs of each marque.

At first, their primary responsibility was selecting trim materials, colours and detailing for Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs and Buicks, while elements such as the instrument panels were dealt with by their colleagues.

In 1958, to promote the Damsels’ work, Earl organised the Feminine Auto Show in GM’s Styling Dome at the Technical Center.

Marjorie Ford Pohlman’s Tampico Buick Special, which featured innovative storage solutions

It was publicised internally and executives from across the company visited – at the time Vauxhall in the UK and Opel in Germany were part of its worldwide corporate empire.

Each of GM’s domestic divisions displayed cars that showcased the influence of its female designers.

Linder’s stylish Chevrolet Impala Martinique was a convertible in pearlescent yellow and white.

Hinting at the multi-colour trim options offered from 1959, it featured seat-trim inserts in a specially designed four-colour fabric that extended to the boot lining and a set of matching luggage, while details included illuminated vanity mirrors.

In a vote among show attendees, the Martinique took top honours.

Glennie chose a stunning metallic silvery-olive hue for her Fancy Free Chevrolet Corvette.

Marjorie Ford Pohlman with a dictaphone in the Buick Shalimar

The interior featured removable seat covers, with a yellow print for summer and simulated black fur for winter.

Retractable seatbelts and a storage bin big enough for a handbag were other innovative features on the car, which survives to this day.

From the Pontiac Studio, Longyear designed a Star Chief hardtop tagged the Bordeaux.

Finished in a deep maroon colour, it had asymmetrically trimmed leather seats and a system of leather boot straps to secure luggage.

Meanwhile, her Bonneville Polaris convertible in Starfire Blue with matching two-tone leather bucket seats featured a special storage compartment for picnic gear.

Suzanne Vanderbilt in the Cadillac Eldorado Baroness she equipped with an ahead-of-its-time mobile phone

For Oldsmobile, Sauer designed the Carousel station wagon with a novel play area for children in the rear seats and toy-storage pockets in the back of the front bench.

In the press photos from 1958, four-year-old Terry Donaldson appears to be having a great time.

Ford Pohlman produced two concepts for Buick. The Tampico Buick Special Convertible was painted Alabaster (a gypsum-like hue) with a Flame Orange interior.

It featured sporty bucket seats and a storage console designed to fit binoculars and a camera.

She also styled the Shalimar, a Buick Limited four-door hardtop with deep Royal Purple bodywork and matching interior trim.

It, too, bristled with innovative features, including a storage compartment sited in the front seatback and a swing-out dictaphone in the glovebox.

Four of the pioneering design team worked on GM subsidiary Frigidaire’s Kitchen of Tomorrow project

Over at Cadillac, Vanderbilt presented two designs.

The Eldorado Seville Baroness Coupe was finished in black with a vinyl roof and a custom black-and-white interior trimmed in mouton, but its defining feature was a radio-telephone: another example of thinking that was far ahead of its time.

Displayed alongside, under the styling dome, Vanderbilt’s grey-green-metallic Saxony also had a matching interior, in leather with cloth inserts and, once again, neat storage pockets in the seats.

“We particularly enjoyed proving to our male counterparts that we are not in the business to add lace doilies to seatbacks or rhinestones to the carpets,” Vanderbilt said at the time, “but to make the automobile just as usable and attractive to both men and women as we possibly can.”

Indeed, their out-of-the-box thinking contributed to innovations such as childproof door locks, illuminated vanity mirrors, cupholders and storage consoles.

The Feminine Auto Show took over GM’s Styling Dome in 1958

At Frigidaire, Krebs, Arnold, Kavanaugh and van Alstyne developed designs for individual appliances as well as collaborating on the 1955 Frigidaire Kitchen of Tomorrow – thereby influencing the designs of American kitchens throughout the 1960s.

The 1958 Feminine Auto Show would turn out to be the high-water mark for the influence of the Damsels of Design.

In 1959, Harley Earl reached the mandatory retirement age of 65.

He stepped down and was replaced by Bill Mitchell, who didn’t share Earl’s progressive enthusiasm.

“No women are going to stand next to my male senior designers,” he said.

With Mitchell in charge, the Damsels’ time as cutting-edge influencers within the halls of the Technical Center would come to an end; by the early ’60s, all but one of them had left the firm.

Vanderbilt was the exception: after a break to get her Master of Fine Arts degree, she stayed at GM Design until her retirement in 1977.

Several of her former colleagues took positions with other companies, while others established their own design firms, often consulting on automotive projects; Gere Kavanaugh is still active today, into her 90s.

It would be more than a decade before GM made another serious effort to recruit the best and brightest women into its design and engineering ranks.

Images: GM Heritage Archive

Less masculine Mopars

The 1955 Dodge La Femme was a production version of a show car

General Motors was not the only company among Detroit’s Big Three that targeted the emerging post-war market for female drivers.

While Ford’s dream-car focus was on space-age-styled concepts, one of which would emerge almost a decade later on television as the Batmobile, the designers at Chrysler took a more cautious approach.

Its 1955 Dodge La Femme (above) was based on two 1954 Chrysler show cars: Le Comte and La Comtesse.

Each had been created from a 1954 Chrysler Newport two-door hardtop and given a clear plastic roof that covered the entire passenger compartment.

While Le Comte was less daring, La Comtesse was painted a fetching two-tone combination of Dusty Rose and Pigeon Grey.

Positive reaction on the 1954 show circuit encouraged Chrysler to offer a production version in 1955 for its Dodge Division, La Femme.

It was produced for just two model years, 1955 and 1956, and fewer than 2500 were built.

Memories of the Motorama era

A collection of General Motors Dream Cars on display at the Petersen Museum in California, USA

From 1949-’61, General Motors’ Motorama was an annual roadshow showcasing the vehicles from all five automotive divisions, along with appliances and kitchen designs from its Frigidaire subsidiary.

Harley Earl, once called GM’s greatest salesman, used the Motoramas to present to the public new ideas in the form of Dream Cars.

Collector Joe Bortz has spent a lifetime finding, rescuing and restoring Motorama machines.

From now until March 2026, six of his cars dating from 1953, 1954 and 1955 – the peak years of the Motorama – are on public display at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles, including the 1955 Chevrolet Biscayne (above).

See petersen.org for more information

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