The Modern Woman

“I think the bicycle has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world.  I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood.”   Susan B. Anthony

Prior to the suffrage movement, women were thought to be fragile creatures and were discouraged from playing sports. Fortunately for first-wave feminists, doctors began suggesting that light activity was actually healthy for women, which then helped to create the “rational dress movement” featuring garments more suited for swimming and bicycling rather than the full, heavy skirts and corsets that society required. They,  of course, would still cover their limbs and torso.

The first wave of the women’s rights movement was well underway by the time the bicycle craze hit the US and Europe in the 1890s.  Bikes not only provided women with an independent mode of travel, but for the first time they found freedom and adventure independent from their fathers and husbands. 

And with that, bicycles became the symbol of the “new woman” of the late 19th century: educated, active in sports, pursuing a career, and looking for marriage based on equality.  At the age of 80, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would say that “the bicycle will inspire women with more courage, self-respect, self-reliance…” And with her new-found confidence, women would be fearless in other areas—demanding her voting rights were just a bike ride away.   

In her 1895 book, Lady Cyclist, Louise Jeye says, “This is a new dawn, a dawn of emancipation, and it is brought about by the cycle” and “…free to wheel, free to spin out in the glorious country…the young girl of today can feel the real independence of herself and, while she is building up her better constitution, she is developing her mind.” 

In How Cycling Can Save the World, Canadian academic Patricia Anne Vertinsky claims “overall, the bicycle did more perhaps than any activity to form new conceptions of what was possible for women to do.” 

“I think the most vicious thing I ever saw in all my life is a woman on a bicycle—and Washington is full of them. I had thought that cigarette smoking was the worst thing a woman could do, but I have changed my mind.” Sunday Herald, 1891