Driver, taxi driver and astronaut: How women mastered "male" professions

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Today, no one is surprised by women driving a car or ladies-dentists, but even 100 years ago, many professions were considered primordially male, and men were in no hurry to let the weaker sex into their territory. In order to overcome stereotypes and become the first in the “non-female” profession, many women had to overcome real difficulties.

Lucy Hobbs Taylor

This brave woman was born in 1833 in a small town in the state of New York. Having worked as a teacher for almost ten years, the girl decided to get a more interesting profession. However, she did not even succeed in applying for admission to the institute, because she chose a difficult specialty, in which, as it was believed, women had no place. Today it may come as a surprise, but Lucy only dreamed of becoming a dentist. Without abandoning this crazy idea, the girl began to take private lessons from a professor at the College of Dental Surgery and still opened a private practice. Probably, at first she also had problems with patients, because, in her own words,

It was only after five years of successful work in this field that Lucy finally received permission to join the Iowa Dental Society and was able to enter the College of Dental Surgery. She received her doctorate in 1866 and became the first female dentist in history. By the way, it is believed that many ladies followed in her footsteps, and by 1900 the number of certified dentists in skirts had increased to a thousand, which can be considered just an explosive development of the “non-female profession”.

Bertha Benz

With whom only women are not compared at the wheel! But in our century, autolady is becoming more and more. However, in this case, the men are in vain, because the ladies began to drive cars almost immediately after self-propelled vehicles appeared on the roads. The first female driver is believed to be Bertha Benz, the wife of the inventor of the car, Karl Benz. At the end of the 19th century, this technical novelty did not take root well; not everyone liked the belching clouds of smoke and thundering iron carts. The business of the Benz family business was not going well. Then, in order to support her husband in his endeavor, the brave woman decided to take a very bold step. Taking one of the cars without asking, she put her eldest sons in it and drove to a neighboring town.

Having driven a total of 200 kilometers, she showed that even a woman can handle a self-propelled gun. It happened in 1888. The publicity stunt succeeded, and the car trade soon revived. By the way, after such a serious check, Berta had several ideas for improving the car, which she shared with her husband. For example, it was she who came up with the idea of a gearbox.

Elisabeth von Papp and her equestrian colleagues

Having mastered the car once, women, of course, tried to take over the professions associated with this type of transport. By the way, today there are even women truckers, but this is still an exception to the rule, since this work is really very difficult for the “fairer sex”. But women taxi drivers appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1908, a German woman, Elisabeth von Papp, got behind the wheel of a taxi after she was left a widow and was forced to feed her children alone. The woman even studied at the Berlin School of Taxi Drivers, but almost all her life she met very different reactions among colleagues and passengers. With this bold step, Elizabeth was ahead of her time by about 50 years - women began to master this profession en masse only after the war.

I must say that in Paris at about the same time there was a revolution in the minds of the inhabitants: in February 1907, the first female cabbies appeared on the streets of the city. In order to pass the exam and get permission from the police, three emancipated ladies took one-month courses, which, in addition to driving rules, then included the basics of veterinary medicine, as well as the geography of Paris and the suburbs.

By the way, the first cabbies were aristocrats and soon they abandoned this profession, but after a couple of years more than 40 ladies were traveling around Paris! True, literally in a few years their number was halved, and then the women cabbies disappeared, after all, being a driver of a horse-drawn carriage in any weather is quite difficult, and public opinion ridiculed the courageous pioneers.

Raymonda de Laroche

In her youth, the Frenchwoman Elise Desroches dreamed of becoming an actress, so she changed her name to a more sonorous one, but she had a chance to conquer not the stage, but the sky. At first, the girl was carried away by balloons and flew these devices several times. Then she charmed the designer Charles Voisin so much that he allowed her to ride a little airplane, but only, of course, on the ground. However, the girl, to his great surprise, immediately rose into the sky, and then quite safely managed to land. A few months later, in 1910, Raymonda took part in flight competitions and received a pilot's diploma.

True, a dangerous hobby in the end ruined the first woman to conquer the sky. Just a few months later, she had an accident, after which she managed to rehabilitate herself, and a couple of years later - the second, which turned out to be fatal for her. True, in this accident, Raymonda de Laroche was not to blame, at the time of the crash she was not a pilot, but a passenger of an airplane.

Valentina Tereshkova

Just fifty years later, a woman astronaut made her first flight. By the way, today of all people who have been in space, women make up 10%. And 82-year-old Valentina Vladimirovna, who retained not only activity, but also female beauty at such an old age, continues to share her experience with young people.

(From an interview with Valentina Tereshkova after the flight)