Rosie. Babe. Ruth. Susan B. Frances.
WomanTours has a long-standing tradition of naming our vans after women who made great history. This being Women’s History Month, we’d like to honor these courageous women for their ground-breaking contributions to our society and culture. Plus, it’s our way to say thanks to the hard-working vehicles that make our tours possible. Vrooom!
Rosie
Our East Coast Chevy van is named for Rosie the Riveter, the fictional yet powerful icon that represented the millions of women who worked the factories and shipyards during World War II as their male counterparts left for combat. While the government media campaign to draw women to work spawned myriad images of tool-wielding gals whose hair was wrapped in bandanas (a safety mandate), Rosie as a concept was christened with this 1943 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. The song starts:
All day long, whether rain or shine,
She’s a part of the assembly line.
She’s making history, working for victory ---
Rosie (brrrrr—sound of drill) the Riveter.
In 2024, surviving Rosies were celebrated with a Congressional Gold Medal. They were represented by Mae Krier, who at 17 left her North Dakota home for Seattle to work in the Boeing factories. After the war, Krier worked tireless to make sure that all the Rosies of her generation were not forgotten. Now in her late 90s, she is still spreading the story. This year, the Rosie the Riveter WWII Homefront National Historic Park in Richmond, CA celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Babe
Babe, our West Coast Chevy van, was named for athletic wunderkind Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who won two gold medals and a silver medal in track and field in the 1932 Olympics and then went on to become a professional golfer, amassing 82 tournament victories in her career.
In addition to golf and track and field, Didrikson also excelled at other sports. Playing baseball as a kid with her neighborhood peers, she earned the nickname Babe (after record-setter Babe Ruth) because of her frequent home runs. As a young working woman, she played on the company basketball team. She was also an ace in billiards, bowling, tennis, skating, swimming, diving, boxing and yes, cycling.
Didrikson continued to compete in the professional golf circuit after being diagnosed with colon cancer in 1953, winning the U.S. Women’s Open in 1954. She succumbed to the disease in 1956 at the tragically young age of 45.
Didrikson posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2021.
Ruth
Our newest East Coast Chevy Express van is named for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or as she was affectionately called later in her career, the Notorious RBG. Nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was only the second woman to serve in the highest court and the first Jewish woman to hold that honor. She served until her death in 2020 at the age of 87.
NPR’s Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg called Ginsberg the “architect of the legal fight for women’s rights in the 1970s.” When you consider the hurdles she faced while earning her Harvard law degree and starting her career in the 1950s as a working wife and mother, you can understand where her chutzpah for gender equality and equal protection came from. “In the fifties, the traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews. … But to be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot, that combination was a bit much,” she told a New York Times reporter in 1993.
Leading up to her Supreme Court nomination, she spearheaded the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (winning six landmark cases before the U.S. Supreme Court), became the first tenured female law professor at Columbia University, and served for 13 years as President Jimmy Carter’s appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
RBG was just as powerful in the Supreme Court gym, and for many years could heave more weight than Justices Breyer and Kagan. Our van Ruth can haul the entire nine justices plus six others to boot.
Susan B.
Our West Coast Chevy van Susan B. drives with even more confidence and shine around election season, as she is named for social reformer and women's suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Raised in a Quaker home where she mastered reading and writing by age 3, Anthony began her career as a teacher in upstate New York, where she discovered the stupendous pay discrimination between men and women. From a young age she was steeped in Abolitionist politics and values and in the 1850s traveled on the anti-slavery lecture circuit.
It was also during this decade that she befriended Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had spearheaded the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848. The two launched the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.
Anthony boldly voted in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester, NY. Weeks later, she was arrested. Due to the wild publicity the trial would receive, it was moved to nearby Ontario County, where the judge demanded that the jury deem her guilty. Anthony countered: “For in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored.”
She refused to pay the $100 fine. The judge refused to send her to jail, which meant she could not take her case to the Supreme Court. Anthony died in 1906 at the age of 86, 14 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave many (but not all) women the right to vote.
Our New York: Women’s History in Finger Lakes Wine Country Tour includes a guided tour of Anthony’s Rochester home. It also has an overnight in Seneca Falls, as does our NY: Empire State Erie Canalway Tour.
Frances
Our East Coast Ford 350 van Frances is named after educator, suffragist and temperance reformer Frances Willard. As an educator, Willard never shied away from taking charge, and became the president of Evanston College of Ladies in Illinois, and after that, the dean of Women’s College, which was folded into Northwestern University.
She eventually left this field to devote her leadership skills to the women’s temperance movement, taking the reins of the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1879, a job she held the rest of her life. Temperance activism merged with suffrage advocacy. Willard promoted a strategy she called Home Protection, the idea that the ballot, especially on the local level, could enfranchise women to protect their homes and families from the ravages of alcoholic violence and destruction through prohibition legislation.
Willard was a late bloomer when it came to cycling, mounting her first bike in her 50s. She believed, as did Anthony, that bicycles were an important vehicle for women’s liberation and health, and as such advocated for dress reform. You can read her short book, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, here. In 1898, Willard died in her sleep. She was 58.
Not coincidentally, our van Frances also pays homage to WomanTours President Jackie Marchand's late mother, a Frances who was a force of nature in her own right.
And now about those trailers...
Fannie. Kittie. Harriet. Sally. Our other Women's History Month blog is devoted to the women who inspired the names for our trailers.