When the car market was still up for grabs
In the late 1890s, the American auto industry was still tiny enough that a curious buyer could almost keep the whole field in their head. There were only a few dozen carmakers at first, then a lot more just a few years later. By 1910, production had moved far beyond the days when cars were rare mechanical oddities. Output had climbed from a few thousand vehicles in the early 1900s to well over a hundred thousand a year.
That growth didn’t mean anyone had settled the question of how a car ought to work. Steam, gasoline and electric cars all fought for the same customers. Each one had a case to make. Each one had a flaw that could ruin the sale.
Steam arrived with a built-in advantage. Railroad and locomotive builders already knew how to make boilers, valves, burners and pressure systems, so the idea of a steam road vehicle didn’t seem far-fetched. The trouble was the rest of the package. Steam cars could be hot, fussy and a little too eager to remind everyone that fire was part of the process. They also came with a lot of plumbing. Pipes, tanks, water levels and pressure controls turned a drive into something closer to a supervised technical operation.
In the first auto boom, the future was a pile of loud, hot, half-solved ideas, and nobody had voted on the winner yet.
Gasoline cars had their own problems. They were lighter and eventually cheaper to scale, but early buyers had to live with a world that hadn’t caught up to the machine. Fuel stations were scarce. Long trips took planning. A driver couldn’t count on finding the next refill around the corner, because the network barely existed. Electric cars faced the same basic issue. Charging points were just as thin on the ground, and a battery that ran down left the owner waiting for the next convenient plug, which was often at home or nowhere at all.
Then there was the crank. Before electric starters arrived in the early 1910s, a gasoline car usually had to be started by hand. That meant leaning over the front of the vehicle, grabbing a metal crank and turning it until the engine caught. If it caught. The procedure was awkward at best and dangerous at worst, since a backfire could send the handle whipping back hard enough to break a wrist. A lot of modern readers assume early gasoline cars were obviously easier to live with. In practice, they often weren’t.
So the market didn’t open with one clear winner. It opened with competing machines, patchy systems and buyers trying to judge which inconveniences they could tolerate. That uncertainty helps explain why electric car history took the route it did. It also makes the later link between women and automobiles easier to understand, because the early car buyer was still deciding what kind of driver and what kind of machine, even made sense.
Why electric cars seemed like the polite choice
In the early years of automotive history, electric cars had a simple sales pitch: they behaved themselves. That may sound faintly ridiculous now, when EV debates tend to revolve around charging speeds, battery chemistry and price. Back then, the appeal was much more immediate. You could get in, switch the thing on, and leave without wrestling a crank or taking a face full of engine smell.
That ease mattered. A gasoline car in the 1900s could be a finicky beast. Arguably, before electric starters became common in the early 1910s, drivers usually had to hand-crank the engine to bring it to life. The process was awkward at best and ugly at worst. And the crank could kick back hard enough to injure a wrist or arm, if the timing was off. By contrast, early electric vehicles tended to start with a battery switch, often turned with a key. No huffing, no grunting, no ceremonial battle with a metal handle before breakfast.
Quiet was part of the appeal too. Electric motors did their work with far less racket than a gasoline engine, and they did it without the sharp exhaust smell that clung to internal combustion cars. For people who wanted a clean ride, that difference was hard to miss. It made the car feel less like a machine that demanded attention and more like one that quietly did the job. The Library of Congress has several useful records on early electric cars, and they make plain how often cleanliness and ease came up in the way these vehicles were described.
A car that starts without a struggle and leaves no stink behind was easy to call civilized.
That sort of language mattered because buyers were already being taught to connect utility with social image. A machine was never just a machine. It carried a message about who drove it, how they lived and how much trouble they were willing to tolerate. Electric cars, with their tidy operation and low fuss, fit neatly into that picture. Or preferred a car that didn’t announce itself to the whole street, the electric option looked sensible, if you valued convenience. Maybe even a little refined.
Carmakers noticed that, and they aimed some of their pitch at doctors. The reasoning was pretty practical. A physician making house calls late at night didn’t want to wake half the neighborhood with a clattering engine and a cloud of fumes. An electric car slipped into that role nicely. It could carry a doctor to a patient’s door with less noise and less drama, which is a rare combination in any century. A 1917 Library of Congress image collection post, Caught Our Eyes: It’s Electric!, shows how often these cars were presented as neat, orderly, and almost domestic in their appearance.
Of course, the picture wasn’t perfect. Charging infrastructure was thin, and that limitation was real. You couldn’t yet count on a dense web of public charging points, because there wasn’t one. Long trips still required planning, and sometimes a bit of luck. Yet the future of the powertrain hadn’t settled into place. No surprise there. Gasoline cars had convenience problems of their own, and the electric car’s drawbacks didn’t automatically look worse than everyone else’s. The market was still messy enough that no one could say with confidence which technology would win.
That uncertainty made room for image politics. Buyers were being sorted, implicitly and explicitly, into types. Some cars were framed as rugged. Others were presented as practical. Electric cars landed in the category of clean, quiet and easy to live with, which made them easy to pair with certain kinds of users in the public imagination. The next step was predictable enough: once a machine’s described as polite, marketers start asking who ought to be seen with it.
How women became the target customer
Once electric cars had been pitched as quiet, clean, and easy to live with, advertisers did what advertisers tend to do: they looked for a buyer and then decided what kind of person that buyer ought to be. The fit seemed obvious to them. If a car started with a switch instead of a crank, didn’t cough out exhaust, and didn’t demand much physical effort, then it could be sold as the sensible choice for a refined woman who wanted transportation without grease on her gloves or soot on her dress. The U.S. Department of Energy’s history of the electric car points to that early appeal, and the marketing language built on it fast.
General Electric leaned hard into that idea in charger advertising. Women appeared in the ads not as afterthoughts or passengers perched beside a man at the wheel, but as users of the equipment itself. They stood next to their cars in tailored dresses, hats and tidy coats. In some images, they looked more prepared for an afternoon appointment than a mechanical task, which was part of the point. The message was simple enough to read without any copy at all: this machine belonged in a respectable home, and the woman in that home could operate it without drama.
Early electric-car advertising sold more than a vehicle. It sold a social role that happened to come with a battery.
That move was clever, if a little blunt. The ads didn’t only say that electric cars were easier to start or quieter in the street. They wrapped those traits in a gendered story about who was careful, who was clean and who could be trusted with modern technology. Women were cast as neat, composed and somehow naturally suited to a car that seemed less demanding than a gasoline model. That may sound quaint now, but the logic was very practical for the time. A machine that avoided fumes and didn’t require a hard pull on a crank could be described as more manageable, and that made it easier to tie to an image of domestic order.
This kind of pitch also spoke to households that worried about mess and hassle more than raw speed. Early cars could be noisy, temperamental, and grimy. Electric cars gave advertisers a cleaner story to tell. A family considering its first automobile might not have been thinking in terms of horsepower charts or battery chemistry. It might have been thinking, “Will this thing stink up the garage?” or “Will somebody need to wrestle with it in the driveway?” When an ad showed a well-dressed woman using the charger herself, it answered those worries without ever saying so directly.
The visual side mattered a lot. If the woman in the ad is simply standing beside the car, she can look ornamental. Opening the gate, or preparing to drive away. She becomes an operator, if she is handling the charger. That distinction sounds small, but it changed the tone of the whole sales pitch. Women were no longer just used as decoration to soften the image of a machine. They were placed in the driver’s seat, or close enough to it to make the role believable. For an early twentieth-century audience, that mattered.
There’s a nice circularity here, too. Electric cars had already been described as polite, tidy vehicles, and then ads turned around and attached those same traits to women. The machine supposedly matched the woman, and the woman supposedly proved the machine’s manners. It was branding by stereotype, with a bow on top. The result was a public association that stuck well enough to show up in later stories about early EV ownership, including cases like Fannie Goodnow’s, where the car, the charger, and the owner all fit the same polished image. Even S.R. Bailey’s electric-car efforts lived inside that world of coded expectations.
The ads tell us something else as well. They show how early electric cars were sold not just as technology, but as social permission. A buyer wasn’t only purchasing transport. She was being told that this was the kind of transport a modern, respectable woman could use without looking unfeminine, dirty, or awkward. That message did a lot of work for a market still trying to figure out who cars were for, and who was supposed to be seen using them.
Fannie Goodnow and the Bailey Victoria Phaeton
By the time the sales pitch had settled on women as a natural audience for electric cars, the idea sounded polished enough on paper. Fannie Goodnow’s car gives it a physical address, a charging setup and a few very practical headaches.
Goodnow, a wealthy woman near Boston, owned a 1908 Bailey Victoria Phaeton, an open two-seater that still had the look of a carriage with an electric motor tucked somewhere out of sight. A surviving example sits in The Henry Ford’s collection, and it is exactly the sort of vehicle that makes early EV history feel less abstract. The body is elegant and restrained. Nothing about it suggests a modern hatchback or a sedan built for errands. It looks like a machine for a household with room, staff, and storage space.
That storage space mattered. Goodnow’s car was charged with a General Electric mercury-arc rectifier installed in a barn next to her parents’ summer home in Hull, Massachusetts. The arrangement was unusual even by the standards of the era, because early electric-car hardware was far from standardized. The plug itself was odd enough to make the whole setup feel improvised. You didn’t just pull up, plug in and forget about it. And you needed the right equipment in the right place, and the right place happened to be a barn.
Early electric cars were sold as simple, but the real experience often looked like a small private infrastructure project.
The rectifier did a specific job. It took alternating current from the grid and converted it into the direct current the battery could use. That sounds tidy now, but the charging process took time. A full recharge could run about half a day, which meant the car needed to be treated more like a scheduled appliance than a spontaneous toy. If the battery was low, you planned around it. And if the battery was empty, you waited.
The car used a 30-cell lead-acid battery made by Gould Storage Battery Co. There was a larger option with about half again as much capacity, but it cost extra, so the basic package was the one most buyers would’ve weighed first. Even that standard setup gave the car a useful range of roughly 64 to 80 kilometers on a charge. That was enough for local driving, shopping and visits in and around town. It wasn’t enough for casual wandering, and it definitely wasn’t built for long, loose trips without a plan.
Money shaped the whole picture too. The Bailey Victoria Phaeton cost about $2,000 at the time, which put it in premium territory. That price point helps explain why the women who appeared in early EV advertisements were often shown as affluent and well dressed. These cars weren’t cheap little conveniences for everyone. They were expensive household purchases for people with space, staff, and a charger in the barn.
The car and charger fit the same world: quiet streets, private property and a life where a vehicle could sit unused for hours while it took on power. That makes Goodnow’s Bailey more than a charming relic. It shows how early electric-car ownership actually worked when the rhetoric about refinement met the reality of plugs, batteries and half-day charge times.
If you want a broader look at how these machines fit into the first decades of motoring, IEEE’s overview of early electric vehicles is a useful companion piece. The pattern is familiar once you see it. The promise was real, but the daily routine was specific, awkward, and very dependent on who owned the house, the barn, and the charger.
From promising niche to historical footnote
S.R. Bailey did not begin with batteries or motors. It started as a carriage and sleigh maker, the kind of firm that did well when horses still ruled the road and snow was just another line item in the business plan. The company won notice in the 1850s, then watched that older market unravel as automobiles took over the roads and carriage orders thinned out. By late 1906, Bailey had moved into electric vehicles, which was a practical decision as much as an optimistic one. If the old trade was drying up, you might as well try the new thing everyone was arguing about.
Early electric cars did not fail because they were foolish ideas. They lost ground because the rest of the market changed faster than their supporting gear did.
The battery story didn’t help. Thomas Edison promoted an alkaline battery in 1903, but the first versions leaked and didn’t hold a charge reliably. That’s a small problem on paper and a very annoying one in real life. By around 1910, Edison had improved the design enough that it looked far more usable and Bailey briefly adopted it. The company then sent one of its cars on a publicity drive from New York to Boston and up Mount Washington, a run of roughly 1,600 kilometers. For an electric vehicle in that era, that kind of trip was a strong sales pitch. It also sounds like the sort of itinerary a salesman would describe with a straight face while everyone else quietly checked the map.
Still, Ford was changing the math underneath all of this. The Model T was rolling out in numbers that electric makers simply couldn’t match, and it came with a price and a production scale that pushed the market toward gasoline. For the debate, it was no longer only about which car felt cleaner or easier to start. It became about what ordinary buyers could afford, repair and refill without planning their week around it.
A few groups tried to make electric ownership less awkward. The Electric Vehicle Association of America formed in 1910 and pushed for standard plugs and charging gear. That effort was sensible, even overdue, but early owners still had to carry adapters and cables because the industry hadn’t settled on one system. No one enjoys shopping for a car and discovering that the charger situation resembles a drawer full of random kitchen cords.
Bailey sold its factory in 1915 after producing only a few hundred electric vehicles. The company’s run was brief, and the early association between electric cars and women drivers faded with it. What lasted longer was the hardware itself. Fannie Goodnow’s charger survived her car by a wide margin and was eventually donated in 2022, a tidy little reminder that the equipment sometimes outlives the machine it was built to serve.
