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lvgaldieri @[email protected] · 2026-02-09 · 14:30 UTC

Hitchhiking As A Type of Women’s Emancipation in the Early Thirties

This scene from director Mervyn LeRoy’s 1934 Heat Lightning brings me back to the observation that American women in the 1920s and 30s pioneered and popularized the practice of hitchhiking. Women like Doris Poggendee and Nettie Matthews, Barbara Starke, Nancy Youse, Betty Simpson, the McManus Sisters, or Allen Ginsberg’s mother Naomi – all could have been models from which these two characters were drawn. Some were out for adventure or, like these two, were seeking their fortune; many others just had no other practical way to get to where they were going, or get away from where they were.

By 1934, the word “hitchhiking” and its variants had already been in circulation for well over a decade (the earliest instance I’ve found, so far, is 1918); and female hitchhikers were an established American “type.” I borrow that word from one reviewer of the 1933 play (also called Heat Lightning) on which LeRoy’s movie is based, and where the characters of “First Hitch-Hiker” and “Second Hitch-Hiker” were played on stage by Gail de Hart and Geraldine Wall. (LeRoy cast “Blonde Cutie” Muriel Evans and the brilliant and under-appreciated brunette comedienne Jill Dennett in the roles.)

The comic portrayal here may not be entirely true to historical type — it would be surprising if it were — but it was the case that American women often hitchhiked in pairs, sometimes advertising in newspapers for a traveling companion.* And then there’s that thumb gesture George makes when he says he and his troubled friend Jeff are “just passing through” – the hailing gesture that we now associate with hitchhiking, and which Helen Card associates with a woman’s “right to ask things of the world.”

In Card’s 1931 book and in newspaper accounts from the 20s and 30s, the hitchhiking type of woman meets with a mix of moral disapproval, admiration for her pluck, and a thinly-disguised sense of titillation. Even here, in LeRoy’s film, the hitchhikers complain about having to listen to their ride’s “speeches about nice girls not hitchhiking” while the old man pinches the thigh of whichever young woman has the misfortune of being seated next to him in the front seat. And that line about the lecherous hypocrisy of the moralizing old codger made this one of the scenes in the film that the Hays Office found objectionable. Nor did it sit well with the Catholic League of Decency, founded in the same year this film was released. The League gave Heat Lightning a rating of C, for “condemned.”

Dressed for the road, as these two are, in trousers (or jodhpurs) tucked into boots, a loose blouse or buttoned shirt, and a sturdy hat, the hitchhiking woman cuts a transgressive figure. Adventuress or androgyne, self-directed or vagabond, an avatar of social dissolution or revolution? She looks like trouble. As one columnist put it in 1928, “the only distinguishing vestment left to man is his trousers…and even these are assumed by the female hitch hikers…. Man may well ask, tremblingly, ‘How much farther is this emancipation to go?'”

How much farther? It’s a question Helen Card takes on, albeit from a different angle, in her book about her hitchhiking adventures (and in this connection it’s worth remembering that the American edition of Card’s Touch and Go appeared under the title Born in Captivity). It’s also a question that runs throughout Heat Lightning itself, though there’s not much hint of it in this comic, flirty scene (except perhaps in the remark George makes, that their ride, “Popsy,” has more to fear from these two tomatoes than they from him).

The film — which is currently playing on Criterion Channel, but which can also be found online — explores this question of women’s emancipation more fully and a little more seriously through the story of its main character, Olga, a former dance hall girl who traded her fancy dress for denim overalls and now runs a filling station with her kid sister in the California desert. By the end of the picture, Olga’s virtue may be compromised, but her independence is not.

*Postscript 12 Feb 26: It was also the case that women in the late 1920s and early 30s were hitchhiking to Hollywood, or at least the newspapers said they were. The type was well known. The 1933 Will Rogers film Mr. Skitch features Florence Desmond as a hitchhiker bound for Hollywood. I hope to find a copy and watch it soon.

Correction 13 Feb 26: The 28 December 1933 review of Mr. Skitch that got me looking for a copy of the Will Rogers film was misleading. In the film, which I’ve just managed to see, Florence Desmond is headed for Hollywood, but she’s not a hitch-hiker; she just flags down Will Rogers and his family because her own car has run out of gasoline. I haven’t seen any instance where the word is used in this way, as a request for roadside aid, so I’m assuming it’s just an error.

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