What Danica Patrick’s ‘female mind’ comments miss about history of women in motorsport

As David Coulthard once again touches on his optimism for the future of women in motorsport, the comments of several detractors have filtered back into the public consciousness, most notably resurfaced comments from Danica Patrick.

Patrick’s belief is that the “feminine mind” isn’t cut out for racing within the overall scope of motorsport history — but it is a history littered with disempowerment and gender-wide bans that have prevented women from ever having a fair shake at the racing world.

Danica Patrick’s belief in motorsport as masculine — not feminine

At the 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix, Danica Patrick joined a teen-led F1 broadcast designed for children when one of the teenage co-hosts asked the former racer if she thought we’d see a woman compete in Formula 1 in the near future.

Despite having a racing career herself, Patrick’s answer was largely in the negative.

“As I’ve always said in my whole career, it takes 100 guys to come through to find a good one, and then it takes 100 girls,” Patrick began, referring to the sheer number of young go-kart drivers required to discover a stand-out talent.

“That takes a long time to find a good one, right? It just, the odds are not in favor of there always being one or being many of them.”

While that was a fairly astute observation, Patrick went on to conclude, “At the end of the day, I think that the nature of the sport is masculine. It’s aggressive.

“You have to, you know, handle the car — not only just the car, because that’s a skill, but the mindset that it takes to be really good is something that’s not normal in a feminine mind, in a female mind.

“You have to be, like, for me, I know if somebody tries to bow up or make it difficult on me, I would go into like an aggressive kill mode, right? You just want to go after them, and that’s just not a natural feminine thought.

“I say that because I’ve asked my friends about it, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s not how I think.'”

From a woman who competed in both IndyCar and NASCAR — two series notable for their heavy, difficult-to-drive machinery and their high level of competition – Patrick appears to see herself as an outlier, holding onto a longstanding, if outdated, belief that women have less of a competitive instinct than their male counterparts.

Now, to situate Patrick’s comments in the history of female participation in racing — and the sheer number of times competitive women were banned from motorsport.

More on women in Formula 1:

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👉 75 days of hell: F1’s last woman driver has a shocking story to tell

A history of women behind the wheel

When the automobile was first proposed to the world in the late 19th century, it avoided tidy gender coding. Bertha Benz was a key pioneer in the automotive scene, while women like Helene Van Zuylen and Camille du Gast forged names for themselves in the European racing world.

As with most things mechanical, men were expected to enjoy the car, but the fact that women did, too, was no surprise.

However, almost immediately after, marketing agencies and media began to shape the public narrative around women and their automobiles into a weapon.

In Anne Helen Petersen’s excellent Culture Study newsletter, she really dove into how these perceptions of women behind the wheel have evolved — though please keep in mind that her research has largely focused on the American market.

In effect, Petersen notes that while there was little direct outrage against the idea of women behind the wheel of the consumer car, they were subtly discouraged from engaging in car culture through marketing narratives that focused either on the aesthetic automotive preferences of women, or on treating the car as an extension of the household for mothers and wives.

In fact, early automotive advertising — again, at least in the United States — highlighted adventurous women behind the wheel. This was the era of the Gibson Girl and the New Woman, or, women who were confident and expected to explore.

But by the early 1920s, a shift had taken place. Cars had become increasingly more masculinised, which led the men in charge of the automotive design and marketing firms to begin pointing their discussions at a male consumer base. Even though women were still car buyers and drivers, they were not taken seriously as consumers.

The unconscious decision to de-prioritise the female auto consumer is tied to a fair amount of historic panic about what women should be allowed to do.

For example, when women began to adopt the bicycle in ever-increasing numbers, a strong backlash followed. Bicycles gave women more freedom outside of the domestic sphere, which in itself was a threatening concept to many men. Further, it encouraged changes in dress, from long skirts to fitted bloomers.

The reaction was fierce. Men argued that bicycling would make women sexually aggressive, that any physical activity would lead to a terrible disease called “bicycle face” — basically, that women would become uglier with exertion — and that women bicycling alongside men would pose an inherent danger to those men. The whole goal was to paint a highly undesirable picture of the active woman, who was seen as being out of her depth.

There was less fear about women adopting the automobile as a general transportation tool, but the act of competing in a race was deeply intimidating to many men, who once again relied on the tropes that women are not designed to compete, that they’re inherently somehow less skilled than their male counterparts, to argue against their presence.

Now that we’ve established a rough history, let’s talk specifics.

1907: No women allowed at Brooklands

Brooklands was one of the first purpose-built racing circuits in the entire world, and when it was debuted in England, it came with an accompanying ban against female drivers. Only men would be allowed to take on the oval track.

That ban was ultimately lifted within 20 years, though women weren’t necessarily encouraged to compete against men. Rather, the track opened up for all-female “handicap” events or all-female record attempts. Those were primarily designed as promotional tools and were not expected to be legitimate and serious competitions.

1909: AAA bans women from motorsport competition

One of the original bans on female participation in motorsport came in 1909, when the American Automobile Association (AAA) prohibited women from competing.

The AAA Contest Board was founded in 1899 as a way to organise sporting contests among the elite amateurs who had the money to afford an automobile but who perhaps weren’t interested in becoming professional racers — though within just a few years, the AAA was organising national championships and sanctioning events like the Indianapolis 500 and the Vanderbilt Cup.

The AAA itself was something of a genderless entity, though men were the primary motorists at the time; enthusiastic women like Joan Cuneo were early adopters of the automobile and had earned their AAA membership — only to be denied access to big races.

Cuneo applied to compete in the 1905 Glidden Tour event sanctioned by the AAA and was promptly rejected because she was a woman. In retort, Cuneo argued that nothing in the rulebook actively forbade women from racing; as a result, the AAA had to let her race, and she began to compete more regularly around America.

Until 1909. Soon after Cuneo finished a stunning second at a race during a Mardi Gras festival, the AAA officially moved to ban women from the sport. Cuneo’s career came to an immediate end — and with it went the possibility of any other women following in her footsteps.

The ban held until 1955, when AAA shuttered its Contest Board in the wake of that year’s Le Mans disaster.

1956: ACO bans women from Le Mans

While women didn’t make up the entire grid at the 24 Hours of Le Mans during the event’s earliest years, they were a regular presence in the 1930s, with big names like Kay Petre, Odette Siko, Marguerite Mareuse, Anne-Cecile Rose-Itier, Elsie Wisdom, and more getting behind the wheel.

But after the 1951 running of the event — which saw Betty Haig enter from the United Kingdom — it took years for women to be allowed back on the grid. That’s because in 1956, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest banned women from competing in motorsport after Annie Bousquet was killed during the 12 Hours of Reims.

The ban was lifted in 1971, when rally racer Marie-Claude Beaumont looked to enter the race. She received provisional approval from the ACO, though her performance in other events was heavily scrutinized before the organizers allowed her to start the 24-hour event.

The postwar era was a strange one for the presence of women in almost all disciplines; as men returned home from the front lines having witnessed the immense horrors of World War II, those same men were keen to return to the jobs that their wives had taken over in their absence.

Further, many of those former soldiers were deeply traumatised by the death and brutality they had seen, and there was a belief that women should not have to experience that same kind of horror — or, perhaps, they weren’t believed capable of reckoning with the death and injury that accompanied motorsport.

1962: FIM bans women from solo world championships

In 1962, two-wheeled racing legend Beryl Swain became the first woman to contest the notoriously dangerous Isle of Man TT — and soon after, the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM) banned women from competing in solo events. That meant Swain was no longer eligible to compete in the 1963 50cc World Championship.

Swain appealed and was told that “no one would like to think about such a charming person getting hurt in a motorcycle.” She quit racing as a result.

The FIM ban on women had never been formally lifted, but there were plenty of opportunities for men to muse on their inherent beliefs that women should not compete in motorsport.

Charlie Rous, the editor of Motor Cycle News, wrote, “Personally, I am very much against women taking part in racing.

“I’ve got nothing against them, in fact I think they’re rather nice, and I would like to see them stay that way. Motorcycle racing is dangerous, and frankly, I think their presence adds to the danger.”

Meanwhile, Count Giovanni Lurani — a journalist turned motorsport administrator — said, “If there was a fatal accident the publicity for the sport would be too bad.”

An unfolding of women in postwar motorsport

While it can be easy to look back at these bans as being a product of their time, it’s still worth reckoning with the fact that women were barred from competing well into recent history.

Maria Teresa de Filippis legitimised women in 1958 by competing in Formula 1 Grands Prix, though even she was told that “the only helmet a woman should wear is the one at the hairdresser’s.”

In 1969, Shirley Muldowney became the first woman to earn an NHRA license despite an initial rejection from the drag racing organisation. She’d go on to become the first person — not the first woman, but the first person — to take three Top Fuel championships.

In 1975, Lella Lombardi became the only woman to score in F1 by taking home a half-point at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Though women had competed in NASCAR since its very inception, Janet Guthrie was the first woman to race on a NASCAR superspeedway in 1976. That same year, she made her first attempt at competing in the Indianapolis 500, forcing the Speedway to definitively lift a longstanding rule that women were not allowed in the garage or the pit lane.

In the early 1980s, Michele Mouton became an Audi factory driver in the World Rally Championship, taking a best overall finish of second.

In 2000, Sarah Fisher was the first woman in American open-wheel racing to stand on a podium. Six years later, Katherine Legge was the first woman to lead laps in IndyCar. Two years after that, Danica Patrick became the first — and thus far only — woman to win an IndyCar race.

What does the history of women in motorsport mean?

Time and again throughout motorsport history, women were banned from racing — not because they were actively dangerous to their male competitors, and not because they were inherently unfit to compete in a masculine sport.

Rather, women were banned out of fear.

Male car enthusiasts and race organisers certainly did muse on the rightful role of women in the motorsport space, and they often relied on tropes that positioned women as inept, afraid of sport, poor competitors who would cause harm to themselves and the men around them, or simply too good-natured to ever be an effective racer. Women were banned for their own good, these men argued.

Notably absent is any evidence for why that was the case. No studies proved that women were more erratic or dangerous behind the wheel than men. No research ever gave shape to the vague assertions that women were biologically constructed in such a way that racing would cause them harm.

Rather, many arguments against women racing conveniently arose at the same time a competitive woman got behind the wheel. Others popped up when a woman was killed, perhaps “proving correct” the biased assertion that women can’t drive.

More than anything, though, the history of women in motorsport has been characterised by control. Women have been systemically prevented from accessing motorsport spaces. They have been barred from racing. They have been discouraged, de-funded, and de-legitimised.

And that has all snowballed into the ongoing conversations we still have today regarding the fitness of women for a sport like Formula 1, and in beliefs like Danica Patrick’s that women aren’t “cut out” for a masculine sport.

We’ve been stuck in the same loop for over a century, arguing for or against women in the sport without any recognition of the fact that their progress has been intentionally and purposefully limited so that we can’t know how they’ll perform.

That’s the point. The more we keep women separated from their male counterparts in motorsport, the less evidence we’ll have to argue that women can be successful racers, and the more we’ll hear from the people who continue to argue that women can’t do it, simply because so few have done it.

When Danica Patrick argues that women aren’t cut out for the “masculine” world of Formula 1, she’s parroting the same talking points that were designed to discourage women from doing things as insignificant as riding a bicycle. They are arguments designed to disempower — and we can tie them directly into a long history of female disempowerment in motorsport.

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