Valley Buick GMC Celebrates Women’s History Month

March is Women’s History Month where we take some time to look at women who have marked a place in our industry’s history. There is far too many  contributions of women to automotive history to fully chronicle here, so Valley Buick GMC will simply provide a small sample. So many products central to our lifestyles and the automobile are due to the ingenuity of women. As we take a brief look at some of the female automotive pioneers, we will start with the most well-known and close to our General Motors products before moving to lesser-known women innovators and influencers. 

	Mary Barra: GM and CEO It is hard to imagine a thicker glass ceiling than the top job at General Motors, but that is what Mary Barra broke through in 2014 when she became CEO of General Motors.  But if you put aside her gender and just look at her resume, her ascendancy to the top position seems obvious. Mary Barra was born just outside of Detroit in Royal Oak, Michigan, and since high school, she has lived and breathed General Motors. She started working for General Motors at 18, inspecting fender panels and hoods as a co-op student. This helped pay for her college tuition at Kettering University (formerly known as the General Motors Institute) where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. Five years later  Barra earned an MBA at the Stanford School of Business on a GM fellowship.  Barra naturally worked at General Motors holding both engineering and administrative positions at GM before becoming the manager of the Hamtramck Assembly plant. She became Vice President of Global Manufacturing Engineering in 2008 and a year later was moved to VP of Global Human Resources. After two years, she was named VP of Global Product Development. This was a busy and uncertain time at GM as Pontiac, Saturn, and Hummer were all shown the door, leaving just Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, and GMC. When Barra took over as chief executive of General Motors in January 2014, she was instantly tested as that was the year GM issued a 30 million vehicle recall over faulty ignition switches. Barra has since been concentrating on transitioning GM into EV manufacturing.
	Mary Anderson  At the turn of the century, Mary Anderson was a rancher, real estate developer, and automotive early-adopter. In 1903, Anderson received a U.S. patent for the first “automotive car window cleaning device controlled from inside the car,” which is a long way of saying “windshield wiper”.
	Hedy Lamarr Hedy Lamarr is better known as one of the brightest stars in film’s golden age of film and one of its greatest beauties. But Lamarr was also a math genius and she certainly used those smarts. She is best known in the science world for creating “frequency hopping”. Originally created to improve Navy torpedo performance during WWII, it became the foundation for cellphone technology, including the 5G systems that are crucial for autonomous vehicle technology. Lamarr also developed plans for improved stoplights.
	Charlotte Bridgewood & Florence Lawrence  Bridgewood and Lawrence were respectively mother and daughter vaudeville performers, with Laurence later becoming an actress in silent films. They used an automobile for their travel and somewhere along the way Bridgewood saw Mary Anderson’s invention and raised it by developing and getting a patent for the first windshield washer cleaner in 1918. For her part, Lawrence developed early precursors to vehicle brake and turn indicators.
	Emily Post Yes, we mean that Emily Post. The author best known for her guides to etiquette was also an automotive journalist. She wrote By Motor to the Golden Gates in 1916 about her trip across the country. In doing so she both legitimized and popularized the idea of women being able to drive on their own, and became something of a promoter of the industry in the process. Post managed to combine her automotive interest with what she is best known for when she published Blue Book, which offered the proper etiquette for female motorists.
	Margaret Wilcox  Margaret Wilcox’s contribution will resonate with everyone here in Washington. Born in 1838, Wilcox became a mechanical engineer which is extraordinary enough for the time. Having grown up in Chicago and possibly inspired by their winters, she developed the idea of passing air through the engine to become heated, leading to an 1893 patent for “certain new and useful Improvements in Car-Heaters.” Wilcox also received patents for clothes washers, a dishwasher, and baking pans.

This is just a sample as there are a plethora of additional influential women from the disciplines of engineering, design, journalism, and management whose contributions helped make the automobile the complex, clean, comfortable, and efficient machine it has become. We invite you to take a look at the latest of what the automobile has become, particularly in SUV and truck form by visiting Valley Buick GMC. When you stop by our showroom, speak with our Valley Buick GMC representatives about our Valley Promise Powertrain Warranty, a little automotive innovation of our own.