Off the highway and back to the Hotpoint

	After the American troops returned, working women were regarded with suspicion rather than pride and honor. The shrinking number of jobs in the peacetime economy were supposed to belong to the heroes. Women who had wielded rivet guns and driven transport trucks returned to the hearth and home.
Click thumbnail for larger Image	No wonder Alice Kramden always looked so cross! But then, where could she get a road map to the moon?

Social pressures, covert and overt, were placed upon the American woman to give up her out-of-home employment; and in many cases, it resulted in the loss of her independence. I see the tiny women on the Illinois and Wisconsin maps waving good-bye to the power they had once held.

Artwork from 1953(left) and 1955 (right) Rand McNally road maps prepared for Sinclair Refining Company are the most obvious in their imagery of the dependent woman among the maps in my collection. What about those mountains and National Parks of Wisconsin? And you thought it was only the dairy state!

	Compare the 1953 Esso Standard Oil map cover, produced by General Drafting, with the 1953 Sinclair. The man must have admitted they were lost, as they both require the assistance of the attendant to show them the way.
	If you are having a sense of déjà vu all over again, I believe this is the same cover that Doug Yorke and co-authors adapted for the 1996 Hitting the Road, unfortunately out of print.

Round up the (un)usual suspects!

Sinclair is not the only company to display the ornamental woman. Deep Rock, Phillips Petroleum, Signal and Skelly Oil maps displayed women in two-piece bathing suits on covers. Most were printed long before this swimsuit style was commonly seen in a conservative America. More recently, this 1969 Rand McNally map, produced for a small Midwestern gasoline station chain, features a couple on the banks of a lake. Consolidated must have reused this artwork for many years, although their maps are truly scarce. Craig Solomonson displays a 1956 cover in his "Minnesota Oil Co. Road Maps Gallery" which is virtually identical except for the older Consolidated logo. Jon Roma's impressive map collection features other small companies (Ace, Amalie) that used the same cover style.

J. Foster Ashburn produced many city maps for DX (a.k.a. Mid-Continent Oil Company, D-X, DX Sunray, Sunray DX), until its merger into Sun Oil and discontinuance as a brand in the 1980s. This 1961 Minneapolis/St. Paul example features a Laura Petrie clone being escorted--or perhaps stuffed-- into what looks like a mutant Lincoln Continental.

After she escaped out the other side, she waited a few years and became Mary Richards.

Here comes a woman, bearing a strange resemblance to Rose Marie, down the street on the 1963 Sunray DX Oil Company map (right). Don't even think about pushing around Sally Rogers!

General Drafting, noted for its artistry, produced some spectacular maps for Esso, Enco, and Humble Oil in an era when most covers featured service station scenes, or blander yet, signs. Of course, the distributors were selling gasoline, not travel per se.

Note the woman enlightening the man in the grey flannel suit in Carlsbad Caverns in this 1959 map. I suspect she also has on very uncomfortable shoes.

The 1959 Carter map, also by a marketer in the Humble family, presages the changing role of the American woman, featuring a downhill skier (upper right quadrant). City maps were generally produced by Goushá (or occasionally Ashburn) rather than General Drafting. However, graphic design was constant among the map producers at this point.

I suspect only the horse has the uncomfortable shoes, carrying two riders.

As many authors have noted, road maps of the late 1960s and 1970s were remarkably plain. This contrasts to the Deco maps which evolved in the Depression but still exhibited a graphic strength. Even the gas station attendant disappeared from the face of the map (except those by Esso/Enco/Humble/Exxon) as he disappeared from virtually all states excepting Oregon and New Jersey, which still prohibit self-serve gasoline.

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Reloaded 21 November 2004.