Women in Cycling: Liberate Me, Baby!

“Many a girl has come to her ruin through a spin on a country road.” – Charlotte Smith, 1896.

Charlotte Smith was a feminist with concerns. Her concern was of the new found freedom that women felt by being on a bicycle. Freed of the heavy, uncomfortable dresses and able to feel the wind on her skin, women could ride as far as their legs would take them. This was a freedom they had never experienced before; a freedom depicted repeatedly in the advertising posters of the day.

Smith feared that this freedom was leading women to ride off on escapades of sin. What a Debbie Downer, eh? The freedom afforded by their bikes allowed them to “mingle” easier with the opposite sex sending them coasting straight down the dirt path of immorality. “The bicycle is the devil’s advance agent morally and physically in thousands of instances,” she once wrote.

You may be thinking, "Oh, c'mon. How can a feminist speak so horribly about a device so liberating?"

Well, Smith’s view on the bicycle is actually the perfect parallel for the complicated feelings within the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States. The movement for Suffrage (women’s right to vote and run for office) began in 1848 and by the 1890’s was a very divisive social topic. Many people did not feel it was a woman’s place to interfere in the affairs of the State, including many women. Some women were fine with their current roles. Some wanted to vote, but still felt their place was in the home. Some felt they deserved the exact same rights as men, which was a very extreme view to have. Let’s not forget, women had only just started putting pants on for the first time (thanks to the bicycle)!

Despite Charlotte Smith’s feeling that bicycles were “indecent and vulgar,” she was a central figure in the feminist movement. She fought for women’s rights in the workplace, edited two women’s magazines, lobbied and pushed for women to get into business, and was known to knock a guy over the head with her umbrella if she caught him mistreating a lady. So, I can only fault her so much.

To be fair, Smith’s remarks probably held some truth to them. In the late 1800’s, the lives of young women were looked after very closely and their interaction with the opposite sex was strictly guarded. They were not afforded much independence at all and they rarely left the home by themselves.

Oh, thank God for the bicycle, right?

Thanks to the bicycle, women were finding a way to explore the world for themselves and, for that matter, explore themselves. Courtships changed as women started experimenting with relationships outside of their strict households. This was the very beginning of women taking charge of their own sexuality!

Oh, thank God for the bicycle, right?

The religious community was in a haze of confusion on what to do. Some churches sided with Charlotte Smith’s view that the bicycle was a downward spiral of sin and loudly denounced the use of the vehicle by women. Others were concerned that their congregations were shrinking as more and more people chose riding their bikes on Sundays instead of worshiping. In fact, several pastors took their services out of the church and onto the bicycle, meeting the cyclists on their own turf. It was the perfect compromise!

Oh, thank God for the bicycle…(seriously, God, I’d personally like to thank you for the bicycle. Amen.)

So, the general concern in the anti-women-on-bicycle movement was that, given her newfound independence, women’s role in society would change completely and permanently. And you know what? They were right.

Oh, thank God for the bicycle!

Women in Cycling: Get Me Out of This Dress!

“Let me tell you what I think of Bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”
- Susan B. Anthony, February 2, 1896

I read that quote for the first time recently. I instantly attached myself to it. After all, as a woman who loves the freeing feeling of being on a bike, I knew exactly what Susan B. Anthony was talking about.

Or did I?

The bicycle was brought to America in 1876 by Colonel Albert Augustus Pope. At that time, bikes had huge wheels in the front and teeny tiny wheels in the back. The bigger the front wheel, the faster the bike. In fact, they went so fast, that most horses couldn’t keep up with them. And since you didn’t have to feed a bike, the “high wheelers” became a much more economical form of transportation than horses. The bicycle was an instant success.

The high wheelers, though, were highly dangerous. They were difficult to mount and the front wheels were so big that hitting any sort of rut in the poorly maintained, horse destroyed roads would send the rider crashing down to Earth. It was during this time that the League of American Wheelmen (L.A.W.) fought for road improvements. Road improvements that would pave the way for the invention of the automobile.

Rather quickly, a new iteration of the bike dawned – the type that we all know and love to this day – with 2 wheels of the same size and a chain that drives the rear wheel. This bike became known as the “safety” because…well, it was safer. Popularity of the safety soared. Hundreds of manufacturers popped up almost overnight as bikes were selling by the hundreds of thousands by 1896. And at $50 - $150 each, it was driving millions of dollars into the American economy.

But enough about the general awesomeness of the bicycle, how did this silly little thing emancipate women?

Think back to what you know about life for women in the late 1800’s. Firstly, women only wore dresses. Huge Victorian dresses. Huge Victorian dresses that oftentimes couldn’t fit through doorways! Women were strapped tightly into corsets - a garment that was not only painful to wear, but was extremely detrimental to internal organs and made it hard for women to breathe. Secondly, women stayed in the home and didn’t wander very far. Lastly, they were discouraged from exercise – it was thought to be bad for them; bad for their reproductive organs.

Enter the bicycle.

The popularity of the bicycle could not be denied. The craze exploded like a cargo ship of Mentos sinking into a sea of Diet Coke. And women got into it. They really got into it. However, it didn’t take long to realize that trying to pilot a bicycle dressed in “proper” women’s clothing was nearly impossible.

Almost immediately, women started tossing their dresses aside in favor of more appropriate cycling clothing. Corsets were the first to go – if she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t ride. And that was a huge deal back then. The use of a corset defined the curves of a women’s body and gave a visual definition of gender roles during that time. Refusing to wear them caused a great uproar especially among men and church groups who feared the blurring of those roles would lead to the infringement of man’s domain.

The concern of gender roles would only increase as women’s riding fashion continued to change. Once free of the corset, the dresses got smaller. Woman finally got tired of trying to ride in a long dress altogether and began opting for a garment called “Bloomers”. Emily Bloomer had developed the shorter skirt with flowing trousers underneath in the 1850’s. But, they caused such an outrage (the thought of a woman wearing any sort of pants was completely unimaginable …only men wore pants; it defined him), that they didn’t really catch on…until the bike came along.

Bloomers became the most useful bike riding garment, but were still not an acceptable form of women’s fashion off the bike. Off the bike, women were still expected to be in their dresses which caused problems of its own. One New York [state] school board banned female school teachers from riding a bike to work to prevent them from showing up in bloomers. “If we do not stop them now they will want to be in style with the New York [City] women and wear bloomers. Then how would our schoolrooms look with the lady teachers parading about among young boys and girls wearing bloomers…We are determined to stop our teachers in time, before they go that far,” said one trustee to the New York Times .

Funny thing is, for all the controversy they caused, the bloomers popularity was short-lived. Although functional, the lady cyclists actually found them ugly and started rejecting them in favor of shorter skirts. Now women were showing their legs. Pictures of women wearing pants (GASP!) even started showing up in advertising and on cigar boxes; the first gender-benders of the New World! American Society was aghast at the impropriety that the bicycle had begun; aghast that women were demanding proper riding clothing…aghast that women were demanding anything at all.

It was the mid 1890’s and women were spiraling out of control at the hands of the bike. In a few short years, the entire image of a woman had changed. But, the emancipation went beyond just clothing. Women were experiencing a freedom they had never known before.

And not all feminists were happy about it. Up next, the anti-cyclist women's movement.