Drivers of alternative-energy vehicles and alternative modes of transportation often have their own little fact from history to share with whomever will listen. Biodiesel fans will be quick to tell neophytes that Rudolf Diesel originally designed his engine to run on vegetable oil. Public transportation advocates will suggest the film Taken For A Ride, which paints GM in a bad light as the company that killed the street car in the middle of the last century. And electric car historians know that from the beginning, many electric cars were targeted towards a specific driving group: women.

The reasons are pretty obvious, as the Automobile in American Life and Society's collection of essays and images reveals. Remember, in the early part of the 20th Century, gasoline cars needed to be started with a hand crank, something seen as decidedly unfeminine. Since EVs didn't need to be hand-cranked, the delicate Victorian woman could drive one on her own. Virginia Scharff, who wrote the 1991 book "Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age," writes:

"The electric car, marketed primarily as a woman's vehicle, provides a striking example of the influence of gender ideology on automotive production. Paradoxically, the electric's failure also illustrates the impossibility of maintaining rigid gender distinctions in motorcar technology at a time when a declining proportion of customers could afford the luxury of his-and-hers automobiles, and where in any case consumers shared certain preferences regardless of sex."

(there's lots more after the jump)