Damsels in Design

It's a little-known slice of auto styling history: In the 1940s and 1950s, talented female designers plied their trade at American car companies, mostly lending their expertise to vehicle interiors, but also conceiving safety and ergonomic improvements.

A new book, Damsels in Design: Women Pioneers in the Automotive Industry, 1939-1959 by Constance Smith, herself a former General Motors designer, profiles the careers of 20 female designers who entered the industry between 1939 and 1959.

Only one of the 20, GM's Suzanne Vanderbilt, made a lifetime career in the industry. The rest either pursued other avenues of industry design or became artists or teachers. Some turned to full-time homemaking. It was a different era.

"Many of these women, missing from our history books, were the most accomplished artists of mid-century America," Smith writes. "With an emphasis on safety, others proposed products that continue to save lives. Their design skills touched tens of millions of car owners. The women were the early designers of child seats, latches, adjustable lumbar buckets, and head up displays — a system of displaying information, such as speed or RPMs, in the driver's line of sight instead of below on the instrument panel."

Here are 10 of the designers profiled.

Helene Rother Ackerknecht, born in 1908 in Leipzig, Germany, was the first woman to design cars for GM. She began her career in the U.S. in 1942 after narrowly escaping the Nazis with her husband, a prominent anti-Nazi activist.

Working with Harley Earl, GM's fabled first head of design, she contributed to vehicle interiors for all the company's brands in the 1940s. In the early 1950s, she worked with the famous Italian car designer Pinin Farina at Nash, developing interiors and textiles on such classic vehicles as the Nash Airflyte.

After dropping out of art school in 1943 to take a job as a secretary in Ann Arbor, Mich., Audrey Moore Hodges met a friend who worked at Studebaker. The friend showed her work to the company's new design chief, Virgil Exner, which led to a job with the carmaker in 1944.

Hodges worked on the interior of the iconic Studebaker Champion and later designed the interior of Preston Tucker's 1948 Tucker automobile.

A GM designer in the late 1950s, Jeanette Linder created the interior and trunk for the 1958 Chevrolet Impala Martinique concept that was part of the Feminine Show, a showcase of existing GM production vehicles styled and modified by women designers at GM.

Smith writes that Linder's "fresh textile designs set the direction for Chevrolet interiors for years to come," including a large, lighted visor vanity mirror on the Impala and a decorative trunk liner with storage slots, a fabric-covered spare tire cover with a pouch and a light in the trunk.

GM designer Ruth Glennie was given a Chevrolet Corvette to make over for the 1958 Feminine Show. She came up with the Fancy Free Corvette, which had four interior treatments to go with a silver olive exterior. One, with green-brushed instruments, featured white phosphorescence numbers and needles. Car historian Phil Patton celebrated Glennie's designs in Corvette Quarterly in 2008, pointing out the car was the first to "feature retractable seat belts, using a pneumatic retracting mode rather than today's familiar spring roller system."

Glennie, who later worked at Vauxhall in the U.K., also created a leather-wrapped fiberglass storage bin as well as a floor-mounted receptacle and storage between the seats.

In 1957, Margaret Elizabeth Sauer designed the Olds Ninety Eight Holiday coupe show car, called the Mona Lisa, and the Starfire convertible show car called the Chantreuse.

In the Olds Carousel wagon in 1958, Sauer proposed the first remote window and door lockout mechanism. NHTSA did not mandate the system until 2004.

Besides designing Chevrolet and Cadillac concept cars in the late 1950s, Suzanne Vanderbilt, during a long career with GM, came up with a child safety latch, lumbar adjustable seating, an instrument panel safety switch and child seats.

The first full-time female designer in GM's styling department, Amy Stanley Light started in 1943 and worked on the Train of Tomorrow rather than cars. The train was an experimental four-car concept built to promote the sale of diesel locomotives in GM's Electro-Motive Division.

Joining the GM styling department in 1955, Jeanette Krebs worked at the Chevrolet studio before moving to Pontiac and contributing to the interior of the Star Chief convertible that appeared at the 1957 Feminine Show. She later transferred to the Truck and Overseas studio. Krebs left the company in 1957 to marry GM engineer Tony Lapine, who would become Porsche's longtime head of styling.

Marjorie Ford and her husband, Pratt Institute classmate Charles Pohlmann, joined GM in 1957. For the Feminine Show that year, she designed the interior and trunk area of the Buick Alouette and chose the exterior colors and ornament. Her 1958 Buick Special convertible show car, called the Tampico, featured an alabaster exterior with flaming orange accents.

When she joined GM in 1950, MaryEllen Green was the youngest designer the company had ever hired, at age 20. Green created the pleated leather seats in the 1950 all-red Cadillac convertible. The Red Cadillac was displayed at the GM building entrance during the brand's anniversary year in 1952. She also designed the interior of the Hopalong Cassidy Cadillac, a 1950 Series 62 Convertible owned by William Boyd, who portrayed the TV cowboy. She eventually would design the seats for the 1955 Packard Caribbean.

The other designers profiled in Damsels in Design are Leota Carroll, Mary Loring, Elizabeth Thatcher Oros, Gere Kavanaugh, Sandra Longyear, Helen Pollins, Martha Jayne Van Alstyne, Virginia Van Brunt, Helen Vincent and Dagmar Arnold.