GM’s “Damsels of Design”

Spend any time researching pioneering female designers and you’ll likely run across General Motors’ so-called Damsels of Design, a group of ten women brought on board by the automaker in the mid-1950s, and the first prominent all-female design team in American history. But not a lot of people know the full story of the Damsels, which is not quite the tale of female empowerment you would hope for.

“What distressed most of us was that we could never be identified as just designers. We were always ‘la femmes’, or ‘the female designers’, … but as designer[s], we designed the same as the men did.”