The Women Who Bucked Gender Roles Along Route 66
In the summer of 1934, 24-year-old hairdresser Darlene Dorgan and four friends embarked on an epic journey that would last almost a decade. The young women, nicknamed the "Gypsy Coeds," took off from Bradford, Illinois, in the "Silver Streak," a rattling 1926 Ford Model T covered in cheerful graffiti, and set off to explore North America.
"She would get her friends and they would all pile into this car, which even in the 1930s was kind of an older car, and they would go on these adventurous trips," says Katrina Parks, producer and director of the documentary "Route 66: The Untold Story of Women on the Mother Road."
Many of the Gypsy Coeds' trips would find them travelling across Route 66, the legendary 2,448-mile highway that ran from Chicago to Santa Monica, with countless Midwest and Wild West stops in between. Over the years, the Coeds would face dozens of flat tires and countless nights roughing it under the stars. The trusty Silver Streak was their personal ticket to freedom.
According to the daily newspaper Atlanta Constitution, the car was a "completely collegiate flivver loaded to the gills with seven suitcases, four five-gallon oil cans, two steamer trunks, five quilts, eight coats, a bushel of peaches, two boxes of plums, one cake, three pots and a frying pan, salt and pepper shakers made out of a corn cob pipe, 11 extra brake bands, two pieces of string, 39 hairpins and six girls."
The Coeds' trips across 40 states would also make them media darlings. They would meet the famed Dionne quintuplets and movie stars like Don Ameche. They even befriended an elderly Henry Ford (who made sure the Silver Streak was repaired when it broke down on the way to the San Francisco World's Fair).
On their travels, the Coeds also doubtlessly came across many of the women who made their livelihood on Route 66, the best, fastest and often only way to drive safely from East to West. An entire ecosystem grew up along the route, and hundreds of women worked in the cafes, tourist traps, motels and gas stations along the road — often not getting the respect they deserved.
"Women's labor in those kinds of businesses… it was expected, but it was not counted," Parks says. "It wouldn't appear in the census. Even if their husband didn't own the business and he was working for someone else, it was often expected that they were part of the package, but of course he would be the only one who would get paid."
In a time of misogyny and limited opportunities, Route 66 offered women a chance to make their mark on the American experience. There were entertainers like Luz Delgadillo Moore, who traveled the West along Route 66 in the 1930s with the Delgadillo Family Band. She later became a Harvey Girl in Seligman, Arizona — also off Route 66 — serving food and entertaining travelers at a hotel owned by legendary hotelier Fred Harvey.
"It was different, you know, and the cowboys…They were real cowboys then," fellow Harvey Girl Cora Mathis Scott recalled. "They weren't those that go around dressing like them. They were really working with the cows."
The legendary Dorothea Lange traversed Route 66 during the Depression, photographing downtrodden and displaced Americans for the Farm Security Administration. "You have women during the Great Depression who forged really interesting careers for themselves out of necessity, like Dorothea Lange," Parks says. "She was no stranger to hardship during the Depression. In fact, she had to put at least one of her children in foster care so that she could be out on the road documenting what was happening in America. And she took these amazing iconic pictures."
But for many people of color, Route 66 was no joyride. "One thing to keep in mind is that the road wasn't the same for all women," Parks says. "If you are a woman of color traveling on Route 66, it was a very different experience. And so, that's what led people like Alberta Ellis to realize the needs for Black travelers, because they couldn't stay most places. They faced not only hostility, but actual real dangers."
Ellis set out to change all that. A serial entrepreneur, Ellis would open in the 1940s a Black and POC friendly snack shack, motel and dance hall known as the Rumpus Room, off Route 66 in Springfield, Missouri.
Another fascinating female fixture of Route 66 would also arrive on the road in the 1940s. Originally from a farm in Rhode Island, Joy Nevin was already a trained agriculturist and pilot in World War II, during which her first love was lost in the war. After being struck with polio, Nevin moved to a friend's ranch in Heber, Arizona, for her health. Taking to western life like a duck to water, she quickly scored a job as a ranch hand.
But Nevin wanted more. "She realized that she could fill this unique niche," Parks says. "And so, she started Stockmen's Supply Service, her cattleman supply company, and she drove around Arizona with this truck and she would bring the supplies to different ranchers. She was a traveling saleswoman for ranchers. It was such a unique thing at the time to be — an entrepreneurial traveling woman."
Up and down Route 66, Nevin — outfitted in jeans and a cowboy hat — delivered everything from ropes to ammunition to hard-bitten ranch owners, causing quite a tizzy as she went.
"Something new is skittering around over Arizona in the form of a department store on wheels, which at times answers as a modern Pony Express," a writer for the Arizona Cattelog reported in 1950. "The inventor, owner and pilot of this outfit is attractive Joy Nevin, a way-down easterner 'gone right' by coming west. If Joy and her Stockmen's Supply Service truck haven't turned into your gateway yet, just wait, she will."
Nevin later married the rough and tumble Dotch Windsor and became a staple at the family's The Painted Desert Trading Post off Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona, where her smarts and fearlessness became local legend.
"One day, Joy noticed a plane circling overhead and realized that the pilot needed to make an emergency landing," according to the website route66women.com. "Always one to think on her feet, she sent cars off in opposite directions to stop traffic on Route 66 and then she guided the pilot to a safe landing. After he refueled at the Trading Post which also had a gas station, he took off and made it safely to Winslow."
In the coming years, planes — along with safer, bigger highways like I-40 — would turn Route 66 into a relic of bygone days. It was decommissioned in 1985, but when you drive the historic stretches that last to this day, you can still feel the wind blowing your hair, and a sense of adventure around every bend.
