ABSTRACT
For a short period around 1920, scooting appeared on urban streets—with designs which remind today’s readers of the current e-scooter boom. The historical episode of early motor scooting is notable insofar as the scooter, even if used by both males and females, was highly gendered, through use as much as by way of construction, design, and marketing. The chapter explores the respective gender dimensions. It inquires why scooters were constructed and perceived as an ideal technology for female riders while placing them in the gendered urban mobility culture of the day. For a while, upper-class women, who were able to afford the scooter as leisure vehicle, appropriated scooters as a means of staging and performing their gender in a public space, and to express their urge for modern forms of urban mobility. By contrast, female drivers of contemporary motorized vehicles, such as combustion cars or motorcycles, were perceived as transgressing the norms of proper femininity. The simple, small scooter design was eventually superseded by larger variants, and only made its reappearance a century later, as a supposedly sustainable form of urban e-mobility.
