Abstract
In the late 1970s, Max Yavno captured a nighttime scene of a young woman refueling a car, bent slightly forward at the waist, her left arm akimbo in the gas-pumping equivalent of classical art’s contrapposto pose. A commercial photographer who turned to artistic work near the end of his life, Yavno was known to have a special affinity for female models, a keen interest in women’s styles and trends.1 He carefully chose the subject and her retail setting to communicate a distinct assertion: women were now pumping their own gas.
I wish to thank the following colleagues, who helped improve this chapter with their instructive comments, encouragement, and recommendations: Andrew Schwalm, Tracy Neumann, Mary N. Woods, Ronald Kline, Katherine Solomons on, and Ferdinando Fasce. My research assistant Marisa Koivisto was instrumental in helping to secure permission to publish the accompanying images. Finally, Mark Stoneman provided expert editorial guidance. Any errors that remain are my own.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Interview with Blaine Yarrington, National Petroleum News [hereafter: NPN] 62 (May 1970): 47.
Theodore Levitt, “Marketing Myopia,” in Modern Marketing Strategy, ed. Edward C. Bursk and John F. Chapman (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 24–48.
Self-service supermarkets featured wide parallel aisles to facilitate swift movement through multitiered shelves on which customers could inspect and select purchases from open product displays. See Richard Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941 (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 78, 111.
With large stores and low prices, supermarkets depended on an economic formula that derived profits by pairing high-volume sales with low labor costs. See M. M. Zimmerman, The Super Market: A Revolution in Distribution (New York, 1955): 145–46;
and James Mayo, The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an Architectural Space (Westport, CT, 1993).
See Daniel Delis Hill, Advertising to the American Woman, 1900–1999 (Columbus, OH, 2002), 38–68.
For a discussion of food shopping as a historically female-gendered activity, see Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (New York, 2001), 145.
Nina E. Lerman, Arwen Palmer Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, “Versatile Tools: Gender Analysis and the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (January 1997): 2.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983).
Walter E. Rogers, “Who Really Buys Gasoline and the Oil You Sell at Your Service Stations?,” Petroleum Age 21 (February 1, 1928): 20–22. Numerous articles over the next two decades would reach the same conclusion: women represented a powerful market force either as direct consumers or in their capacity to influence the purchases of their husbands. See, for example, “Use Pump Display to get Women Customers,” Petroleum Age and Service Station Merchandising 28 (November 1924): 27–28;
Leonard Castle, “Ladies Day Idea Stresses Merchandising and Cleanup,” NPN 40 (August 4, 1948): 7; and “Chevron West Woos the Ladies,” NPN 61 (May 1969): 95.
Her sponsor, Willy-Overland, would claim it was the first; see Curt McConnell, “A Reliable Car and A Woman Who Knows It”: The First Coast-to-Coast Auto Trips by Women, 1899–1916 (Jefferson, NC, 2000), 89.
Tom Wilder, “And Now Your Parlor,” Motor Age 37 (April 1, 1920): 26–27.
Warren C. Platt, “Industry Should Furnish Good Toilets and Make Public Pay for Them,” NPN 20 (September 12, 1928): 85, 87.
Roger B. Stafford, “America’s First Service Station Dedicated to Women,” NPN 22 (April 9, 1930): 89, 92, 96.
For the larger context of the venereal disease scare of the 1930s, see Allan M. Brant, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880, expanded ed. (New York, 1987), 138, 146.
Walter H. Eddy, “Women Urged to Crusade for Clean Restrooms,” NPN 30 (March 30, 1938): 25–26.
For examples, see Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 20–21.
Elizabeth Platt Maison, “Women Shun Dirty Stations,” NPN 30 (April 6, 1938): 33.
Jack Westsmith, “Clean Rest Room Theme Aimed at Women Drivers,” NPN 30 (May 25, 1938): 35–37. As Roger Horowitz found in his study of the meat packing industry, women have long been considered innately clean; see his article “‘Where Men Will Not Work’: Gender, Power, Space, and the Sexual Division of Labor in America’s Meatpacking Industry, 1890–1990,” Technology and Culture 38 (January 1997): 191. On the strategic use of nurses in advertising imagery from the 1920s and 1930s, see Lupton and Miller, The Bathroom, The Kitchen, 20–21.
S. M. Levy, “Letters Invite Women to Station to See Flowers and Shrubbery,” NPN 22 (April 30, 1930): 85, 88.
Chester H. Leibs, Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture (Baltimore, MD, 1985), 100–101.
Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel (New York, 1991), 26.
James H. Collins, “Women and Oil Mix Nicely,” Petroleum World 40, no. 12 (December 1943): 34–37.
Daniel I. Vieyra, “Fill’er Up”: An Architectural History of America’s Gas Stations (New York, 1979), 8.
William Earl Henry, Gasolines, Gasoline Companies and Their Symbols: A Study of Meaning and Reputation of Gasoline (Chicago, IL, 1957), preface.
For one testament to the perceived importance of TBA sales, see Dan Lundberg, Getting into “Serve Yourself” (Culver City, CA, 1950), 58–60.
Walter L. Houdyshell, “Service Station Attendants and Their Customers: A Study of Face to Face Interaction,” (MA thesis, University of Montana, 1973), 57, 166.
Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1991), 588–91.
Steven Lubar, “Men/Women/Production/Consumption,” in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun (Charlottesville, VA, 1998): 22; “Why Marketers Turn to Convenience Store Tie-Ins,” NPN (April 1971): 48.
Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore, MD, 2001), 118. One study using a content analysis of advertisements published in popular magazines in 1970 found that women were seldom depicted outside the home, especially if unaccompanied by a man or other women. In the rare exceptions in which they appeared alone in a male world, women were “portrayed as decorations.”
See Alice E. Courtney and Sarah W. Lockeretz, “A Woman’s Place: An Analysis of the Roles Portrayed by Women in Magazine Advertisements,” Marketing Science Institute, Report No. 70–146 (Cambridge, MA, 1970).
A content analysis of women in magazine ads between 1959 and 1971 found that women were most often shown as beautiful sex objects dependent on men, but that this tendency noticeably decreased between 1969 and 1971 to reflect the changing role of women in society—a result of the sexual revolution, the authors theorize. See M. Venkatesan and Jean Losco, “Women in Magazine Ads: 1959–1971,” Journal of Advertising Research 15, no. 5 (October 1975): 49–54.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 The German Historical Institute
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Donofrio, G. (2012). Gender Realignment: The Design and Marketing of Gas Stations for Women. In: Berghoff, H., Scranton, P., Spiekermann, U. (eds) The Rise of Marketing and Market Research. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071286_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071286_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34388-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-07128-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)