Real AMERICAN history freerepublic.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from freerepublic.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Road trip at the dawn of an era: Women drive cross-country in 1909
The rain was a drag.
In a photo just before they left on the first ever all-female cross-country drive, Alice Huyler Ramsey and her companions are draped in dour rubber ponchos and clutching bouquets in front of the Maxwell automobile showroom on Manhattan s Upper West Side.
Her sisters-in-law appear grief stricken. Ramsey beams from the flank.
Ramsey, a 22-year-old from Hackensack, was about to leave her husband and year-old child behind for the epic girls’ trip. It would be on the Maxwell-Briscoe Company’s dime.
“It sounded like a magnificent adventure,” Ramsey wrote of the trip in her 1961 book,