Chapter 19 — The Two Janes and the Cross-Country Trip Nobody Wrote About

In 1909, two women named Alice Ramsey and Madora Orvis drove a Maxwell automobile from New York to San Francisco. They were the first women to drive across the country. Most people have never heard of them.

In 1915, a woman named Effie Price Gladding drove the Lincoln Highway alone, wrote a book about it, and sold it to a publisher who couldn’t quite decide if she was brave or foolish and settled on treating her as an amusing curiosity.

By the time Route 66 opened in 1926, women driving alone were no longer remarkable enough to be news, which meant nobody was writing about them. This has created a historical record of Route 66 that is, in its published form, overwhelmingly male — the male hitchhikers, the male novelists, the male musicians, the male photographers.

The reality was different. Women drove Route 66 constantly, alone and in groups, for work and vacation and escape and all the same reasons men did. Women ran many of the diners and motels that kept the road functioning. The Harvey Girls were women. Lillian Redman of the Blue Swallow Motel was a woman. The diaries and letters and local newspaper accounts of Route 66 are full of women whose stories didn’t make it into the mythology because the mythology, as it was assembled, was mostly assembled by men.

The road doesn’t care who drives it. It just asks whether you’re willing to go. A lot of women were, and are, and the road received them the same way it receives everyone: with asphalt and possibility and no promises whatsoever.

We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.

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The journey continues. This story is brought to you by ROUTE 66® BEER. Find us at ROUTE66BEER.COM