Suzanne Beauvais
Canada Science and Technology Museum

Within its 50 years of existence, the Society for the History of Technology has dealt with the history of land transportation in the fields of railroad, cycling and automobility in the light of engineering and technology, companies’ histories, consumerism and marketing, popular culture and gender. Very surprisingly, horse-drawn transportation, although an intrinsic aspect of everyone’s life before automobiles, has been almost completely omitted. In this paper, I would like to share my exploration on the subject in the context of urban private horse-drawn transportation, mostly for upper social classes, during the mid-late Victorian era in North America.

More precisely, my attention will be devoted to the study of carriages as cultural and gender objects reflecting the social etiquette and separate sphere discourse of the period. We could even extrapolate by investigating if gender attitudes observed in car culture by Virginia Scharff and Sean O’Connell in their works is in fact intrinsic to this new transportation mode. Our preliminary observations lead us to think that beliefs and stereotypes such as the inability of women to drive vehicles because of their fragile nature are present already during the horse-drawn era when it was suggested that women should not drive with a stallion, a stubborn horse or a horse from an excitable breed.  Speed was for men. Comfort, style, safety and ease of operation were associated with women. To accommodate them, special types of carriages were designed and advertised. We will investigate how these designs differ from gentlemen’s vehicles and how popular they were with the feminine clientele. Paint color had to follow etiquette: dark for formal ladies’ carriages and lighter for sporting vehicles. Also, new systems of latching, hitching up and suspension were conceived to ease operations for… women and offer more comfort. These similarities with the car culture attracted us to look more into the world of personal horse-drawn vehicles as socially constructed objects and also see whether it created the basis for gender attitudes in the car culture. Our study will be based on historical photographs, paintings, etiquette and riding/driving books, lavishly illustrated commercial catalogues and of course, carriages themselves from our museum’s collection.