March is Women’s National History Month, which means it’s time to learn about the most feminists of machines, the bicycle. The invention and popularization of the bicycle in the 19th century helped move the cause of female equality and freedom. Even today, there is no more feminist way to get around.
Sarah Bernhard writes “The bicycle is on the way to transforming our way of life more deeply than you might think. All these young women and girls who are devouring space are refusing domestic family life.” Before the bicycle came along, women in upper classes in the 19th century were expected to only venture outside with chaperones in acceptable public spaces outside of the home. Bikes posed a threat to women staying at home. With bicycles to ride, women had choices.
Bicycles were meant to be used by male riders only; you could ride them rapidly and without a chaperone; and you could use them to exercise freely in public. Bicycling didn’t just give women a way to get around freely; it also, surprisingly, played a role in women’s sexual liberation — purely because some people believed that if women went around straddling something, they would start having orgasms all over the place (which, needless to say, these people thought was a bad thing).
Orgasms aside, there was still the widespread fear that women’s newfound mobility posed its own risks to women’s reproductive health and morality. This sentiment came from Charlotte Smith, whose Boston-based Women’s Rescue League denounced bicycle riding on the grounds that it made young ladies “unwomanly and immodest” and “prevent[ed] motherhood among married women. Taking a bicycle ride in the 1890s meant a woman needed to negotiate public space in a way to which neither she nor the men around her were accustomed. A woman “of refinement and exquisite moral training” could find herself peddling past “uncultivated and degenerate” individuals, “whose coarse, boisterous, and immoral gestures are heard and seen while speeding along our streets and boulevards,” warned a Chicago police chief in 1899.
Fun fact: women were informed that “bicycle face,” the tense expression of concentration required for dodging traffic, would ruin their beauty, and that the whole practice would make them bowlegged from too much pedaling. Women kept pedaling regardless.
Critics also worried over what these ladies would be wearing while bicycling (sound familiar?). And yet, helped women get out of long, restrictive skirts — because while many of them were perfectly happy cycling decorously in ankle-skimmers, some found the practicalities rather unbearable. The beginning of the end for the restrictive skirt was obvious even in 1868, in the earliest women’s bicycling race in history, which took place in France; it’s recorded that many of the women wore scandalously short skirts to help them to pedal more effectively and avoid accidents.
The question of what to wear while riding was perhaps the greatest controversy surrounding women and the bicycle. English rider Helena Swanwick, point-blank refused to wear a skirt again after a ride of which she declared, “It is an unpleasant experience to be hurled onto [the ground] and find that one’s skirt has been so tightly wound around the pedal that one cannot even get up to unwind it.” The solution? Bicycling bloomers, or a “bicycling costume,” as it was known at the time. They still went to the ankles, and were quite voluminous, but they allowed more movement and were far safer.
The tie between bicycles — which made women don more “masculine” dress and go out into the world — and the increasingly strong women’s equality movement across Europe and the United States didn’t go unnoticed, either, by suffragettes themselves or by cartoonists. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were filled with caricatures of lady bicyclists doing such ridiculous things as smoking, rushing off to protests, or trying to get the vote, often while wearing masculine clothing and leaving their husbands at home with the baby.
The idea that physical freedom led to mental liberation, and by extension to a political awakening, was popular—which is probably why the vision of women on bicycles terrified conservative minds. Bicycle-riding women were seen as exemplars of the New Woman, who didn’t necessarily want to have children, be deprived of a career, or have no political voice, and were accordingly praised and/or browbeaten as such. New Women and bikes were so symbolic that, when Cambridge undergrads protested the admission of women in 1897, they did it by hanging up an effigy of a woman on a bicycle. Yep, delightful.
Suffragettes embraced bicycles both symbolically and physically. Popular woman’s monthly Godey’s declared in the 1890s that “there is something women of every class have welcome as a shorter road to freedom than wide, welcoming college doors, or open gateways to the polls. In possession of her bicycle, the daughter of the 19th century feels that the declaration of her independence has been proclaimed.” Susan B. Anthony herself wrote in 1896 that she thought the machine “has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world,” and that she “rejoices every time I see a woman ride by on a bike.”
But they were practical means for campaigning and drawing attention, too; English suffragettes in particular would ride around on bicycles with “Votes For Women” banners in the 1910s, and suffragettes blocked Winston Churchill’s motorcades with bicycles. The suffragette movement even had its own special bicycle: In 1909, an advertisement for it, in the colors of the suffrage movement and with a “Medallion of Freedom,” appeared in the pages of the magazine Votes For Women.
The ride to women’s freedom was no easy cruise. From female adventurers, like Annie Londonderry, who took the world by storm with their bike escapades, to its more prosaic uses ferrying women from place to place, bicycles were strongly in the firmament of feminism, and there they’ve stayed.
Though women have come a long way on bicycles, the fight to ride rages on. There is a clear need for women to have access to bicycles, but issues of safety, street harassment, social attitudes, and poor infrastructure can still limit bike transportation for women. Bicycles have long served as a source of empowerment, and must continue to preserve it as such today.
So take your bike out for a ride, ladies; you and your forebears have earned it.