God, it’s gorgeous. Absolutely stunning. The long body, the shiny white paint with that pink accent and the perfect pink interior to match. It’s like if a wedding cake was magically transformed into a car. As an avid fan of vintage design, the Dodge La Femme is eye candy for me. I already love the girly dresses and fun love songs from the 50s, so what’s there not for me to love about the La Femme? Well, a lot actually. You see, despite my incessant drooling over the machine, there’s always an itch in the back of my mind when it comes to its history.
The Dodge La Femme was born in the 1950s, the era when America’s economy was booming and women were increasingly entering the workforce. It was a great time, especially for car companies, which were constantly innovating and spitting out new ideas left and right, as cars were a now vital part of getting to work from the ever growing suburbs. Chrysler, seeing that women were now also travelling to jobs more frequently and had lots of money to spend, came up with the wonderful idea of a women’s only car. It wasn’t a unique idea, as the Galloway car designed in 1924 by DorothĂ©e Pullinger had been made just for women as well, but it wasn’t a huge success. What the Galloway had going for it though was that it was at least designed by a woman. Chrysler hadn’t bothered to put many women on the design team (if any at all) and just assumed that the hoard of men they hired would be able to understand exactly what women want in a car.Â
The La Femme wasn’t the first version of this car made by Chrysler, no, it was actually a revised version of the 1954 La Comtesse (The Countess) that had a twin: Le Conte (The Count). The two were marketed towards couples, with La Comtesse being painted in a light pink with a white top while Le Conte was painted brown (exciting, I know). The two cars—other than the paint and the interiors—had no discernible differences between them. Chrysler then threw the idea to Dodge to let them deal with the ladies.Â
Dodge took the concept of the La Comtesse and birthed my one true love: the Dodge La Femme. It was based on the Custom Royal Lancer, getting a new two-toned paint job in “Sapphire White” and “Heather Rose”. They finally slapped a little gold “La Femme” script on the front fender and called it a day for the exterior. The interior was adorned with tapestry material that had a rosebud pattern on a silver-pink background and was paired with a pale pink vinyl trim, a downgrade from the Heather Rose leather they planned on using. A reminder: this car was made mainly by men. It was what they thought the ideal woman would want, one of the many physical manifestations of a society saturated with misogyny and oppressive expectations of what a woman should be. It’s something that I—a very left leaning feminist—should hate, yet I have a hard time doing so.Â
There were extra accessories that came with the La Femme made to appeal to female drivers even further. It had a pink calfskin purse that matched the interior, it contained inside it a lipstick case, a comb, a face-powder compact, a cigarette lighter, and a change purse. Each of the accessories is made with faux- tortoiseshell plastic and gold-tone metal, or pink calf-skin and gold-tone metal, incredibly cheap material. There was even a compartment with a raincoat, rain bonnet and umbrella all made of vinyl. These things are insulting, like Dodge thought that all the push women needed to buy a car were simple fashion accessories, the corporate equivalent of jingling keys in front of a baby. It only serves to prove how much the developers and marketing team for the La Femme thought women were simple-minded creatures, born to consume makeup and fashion. So why, goddammit, do I like it?Â
There was a return of the car in 1956, this time in a Misty Orchid and Regal Orchid color scheme, although there weren’t many other notable changes, though that’s besides my main point. I’ve often felt my affection for older aesthetics was a bit off as a serious activist for women’s rights. The way I dress, the music I listen to, and the cars I like are all from a time when women were pressured to present themselves in the way men wanted them to. Is my enjoyment of these things bringing the previous views men had on women back? If I somehow managed to get my hands on a La Femme, would I be digging up old misogynist ideologies from the grave by showing that in some way the men who designed the car were right to think that women would cough up extra money just for pink, cutesy items?Â
There’s been a phrase within vintage fashion communities online along the lines of “vintage style, not vintage values”. It calms me to know that most of the people within the same subculture as me are sane and know that outdated ideas shouldn’t be incorporated into a modern world, but the question I have is how do you go about making sure the vintage community stays out of vintage ideals? If we can prevent the shift towards sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, and other harmful sentiment, how do we start? I believe acknowledgement is our most powerful tool in all of this. The Dodge La Femme does have a beautiful appearance, but it shouldn’t be just limited to women, everyone should be able to appreciate good car design. It does have a past rooted in misogyny and that’s incredibly important to see so that we can keep ourselves from falling back into an awful view of how women should be.Â
The Dodge La Femme was dropped in 1957, the sales of the package being too low for it to ever be profitable. Though there aren’t solid numbers, it’s estimated that there were less than 2,500 made and probably only a handful of them left. The gendered car, like so many other items, failed to actually prove useful or worth the money. There were an amalgamation of reasons why the car failed, but the extra $143 it cost to get the La Femme rather than the regular Royal Lancer just wasn’t good enough compared to other cheaper options of perfectly fine cars. Ultimately, Dodge was wrong about women and how they thought, just because something was pink and included makeup wasn’t going to have women rushing to buy a product. But even if it did fail and was a poor excuse for a marketing gimmick, the Dodge La Femme still takes up a special little corner in the back of my mind.