Monday, July 5, 2010

Veiw* (for View*)

There are many forms of independence and I suspect women often understand this fact better than men do. They're driven to do so. On July 4, 1903, Dorothy Levitt ("the fastest girl on Earth") became the first woman in the world to compete in a motorcar race. She won numerous driving awards, set several records, and even unofficially invented the rear-view mirror by counseling women, in her book The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for All Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor, to keep a "hand-mirror in a convenient place when driving" so that they may "hold the mirror aloft from time to time in order to see behind while driving in traffic." Veiw* pulls into view 16 times in OhioLINK today.

(Dorothy Levitt frontispiece to The Woman and the Car, published worldwide 1907-1909, from Wikipedia.)


Carol Reid

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