The Forgotten Dodge Built for Women, Designed by Men
Automotive design has come a long way in 140 years. In that time, history has been filled with people who thought they had their fingers on the pulse of design and good sense. Well, we can tell you one time Dodge absolutely didn’t. It’s hard to say anyone knows what women, as a group, want to buy when they shop for a car. One thing’s for sure, what Dodge came up with was off the mark by a few hundred thousand miles.
Women on the Road: A Marketing Guru’s Dream Come True
You can only imagine the dollar signs glowing in the eyes of automotive PR agents at the end of the Second World War. Not only were American GIs returning from Europe and the Pacific, running through dealership doors with reckless abandon, but so were their wives! In the streets, activists like Ella Baker were organizing youth-led activism that would one day become Second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. But in Detroit, the vibe the Chrysler Corporation must have felt was clearly very different.
Such was the disconnect between the media and advertising’s portrayal of the ideal American woman and what American women actually wanted to be in those days. So far as Chrysler was concerned, life for America’s women was a performative dance of grocery hauls, child rearing, and servitude that became an objective negative stereotype when viewed through even mild hindsight. One can only assume that’s why Chrysler wanted to market an automobile for women, and women alone, but wound up making an absolute clown show out of it.
At the time, there was only one platform Dodge could naturally pick for the foundation of a femme-forward motor vehicle. Mostly because just a single platform constituted the entirety of its passenger car lineup in the mid 1950s. Every sedan, drop-top, light truck, and station wagon wore the same 120-inch wheelbase underpinnings beneath the skin. With that in mind, Dodge wound up picking the most expensive pillarless two-door hardtop available as their bizarre creation’s template.
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Custom Royal Lancer: A Great Car, With a Bizarre Feminine Trim
The Custom Royal was already a great car by most accounts in the early-to-mid 1950s. As the de-facto flagship for the entire brand, it made the most out of its platform with a brutish and dependable 270-cubic-inch “Red Ram” Hemi V8. With 183 horsepower under the hood in its base form—or 193 with a four-barrel carburetor—this was as close to a sports coupe as Dodge made in those days.
It was also fairly well-equipped for the time, with features like a clever wrap-around front windshield, standard backup lights, and aviation-inspired tail fin motifs at the back. In short, the Dodge Custom Royal Lancer was every bit the equal of equivalent Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Mercurys, and even DeSotos from its own sister brand. Unlike most Dodges in the 21st century, the Custom Royal Lancer’s refinement was something to write home about.
So then, how do you take a capable and well-received two-door hardtop and turn it into something that, allegedly, women wanted to drive? Well, if your answer was to gather a group of men in a design studio and brainstorm what they thought their wives wanted to drive, congratulations, you just landed a job at Chrysler in the mid-1950s. The end results were shocking, well and truly, and not for a good reason.
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Dodge La Femme: A Feminist Icon? Not in This Universe
So, what did they come up with? For starters, for the equivalent of around $1,600 in modern money, checking the La Femme options package netted you pale pink tapestry fabric seat upholstery, complete with pink rosebuds woven in for added XX chromosome action. Outside, a two-tone Sapphire White and Heather Rose in 1955 and Misty Orchid on Regal Orchid in ‘56, the amount of femme-coded buzz words in the paint code alone is enough to groan regardless of your gender.
Already, the color combinations, the obnoxious chrome, and the white-wall tires are enough to make the La Femme feel like it belongs in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, not the real world. But it’s hard to say, on the face of it, that it’s exactly objectionable just yet. That threshold gets crossed as soon as you see the “accessories” these La Femmes came with. For starters, Dodge teamed up with boutique leather suppliers to design a pink calfskin purse that mounted in a special compartment in the passenger seat-back.
Why Dodge thought women wanted an ugly pink purse made of materialexclusively sourced from animal cruelty is anyone’s guess. But it doesn’t stop there, unfortunately. You also got a rose-patterned rain coat, with a matching hat, and an umbrella. No disrespect if you enjoy the aesthetic, but to say this was the archetype for what women actually wanted out of a car in the 1950s is pure comedy. Maybe in the minds of the all-male design team that made it, but certainly not in any objective reality was the La Femme a good idea.
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A Goofy Idea, But One With a Hemi
By the 1956 model year, the 270-cubic-inch Super Red Ram Hemi from the year before had swelled to 315 cubic inches. With heavy-duty suspension and a push-button PowerFlite automatic gearbox, you got all the capability of the standard Custom Royal along with the cringey, ham-fisted feminine marketing. While not quarter-mile sprinters, these big American barges could cruise at highway speeds all day long. They could also get out of their own way from a dig fairly well for their size, thanks to either 3.54:1 or 3.73:1 rear gearing and all that low-end torque.
With a live rear axle at the back and an independent front suspension with coil springs and hydraulic shock absorbers, a Royal-based La Femme could take corners decently well for an American car of the period, but it really was most at home cruising at high speeds like a V8 sofa. There was understeer, there was body roll, but for the mid-1950s, you really could do worse.
Around 2,500 Custom Royals were fitted with the La Femme options package and all the riff-raff that came along with it. Oftentimes, they would sit on dealership lots, doing their best impersonation of a $100,000 2023 half-ton truck on a 2026 lot. In a desperate attempt to move metal, many were field-converted at the dealership back to standard Custom Royals with impromptu paint jobs. Others were bought by male buyers at heavily discounted prices just to strip the paint and re-do it in something more manly later. As a result, these La Femmes are exceptionally rare in numbers-matching order.
An Auction Modern Block Princess, But for All the Wrong Reasons
Today, the La Femme is seen as the closest thing to embodying the stereotype of 1950s women in physical form. That alone adds value to the car itself, and one recently sold on Bring a Trailer for $13,850. It might seem like a low sale, but imagine paying that much for a standard Royal Lancer? Elsewhere, another 1955 La Femme sold at Mecum in Chicago back in 2015 for $51,000. As a time capsule for antiquated attitudes alone, that value is bound to increase as time goes on.
Source: Mecum
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