Freedom on Two Wheels

The History of the Bicycle

Course 1 · Chapter 6 · Freedom on Two Wheels

Once the safety bicycle of The History of the Bicycle 5 was cheap and easy to ride, the machine became a social force as well as a technical one. This chapter covers women and cycling, the debate over clothing, the effects on work, leisure and roads, and the way historians weigh large claims about "liberation". Claims are flagged for checking.

Women and the Bicycle

High wheelers were almost entirely a male affair, but the safety bicycle, with its low frame and equal wheels, could be ridden by women, and in the 1890s many did (check the scale). Tricycles had already given some women a way to ride earlier (check). Riding gave women a degree of independence: they could travel without a carriage or a chaperone, visit friends, go to work and go out into the countryside. A frequently quoted remark, attributed to the American suffragist Susan B. Anthony in 1896, says the bicycle had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world (check the wording and the date). It is a vivid line, but a historian treats it as one voice and not as proof (see the finding below).

Rational Dress

  • The problem. Long skirts, corsets and petticoats were awkward, and sometimes dangerous, on a bicycle: skirts could catch in the chain or the wheel.
  • Solutions. Women tried divided skirts, looser clothes, skirts with weights or guards, and bloomers or knickerbockers, which caused debate and sometimes abuse in the street (check).
  • Organisations. The Rational Dress Society was founded in Britain in 1881 to campaign for sensible clothing (check the date and the group's reach).
  • Reaction. Newspapers, cartoons and preachers attacked and defended "the new woman" on a bicycle (check).
Weighing a big claim "The bicycle liberated women" is partly true and partly an overstatement. Cycling widened the lives of many middle-class women, but working-class women often had little money or leisure to ride, and the vote and wider rights came through political campaigns. A fair sentence says the bicycle helped, among other forces (check how historians put it).

Wider Effects

Work

Workers could live further from the workplace, and messengers, postmen and doctors used bicycles (check).

Leisure

Clubs, Sunday runs and holidays in the country, and cycling as an outing for couples and families (check).

Roads

Cyclists' organisations pressed for better surfaces, and in some countries the "good roads" movement began with them (check).

Population

A wider choice of marriage partners is sometimes said to follow from greater mobility, though this is hard to prove (check).

A British comparison In Britain, cycling clubs and touring organisations were among the first groups to press for better roads, years before the motor car (check). Edinburgh and the Lothians, with their many quiet roads and railway paths, are still popular with cyclists, and some of those old railway routes are now cycle paths (check which).
Check the details Quotations, dates of societies and claims of social change are easy to misstate. Verify any quotation at its source before reusing it.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain two ways the safety bicycle gave women more independence in the 1890s.

→ Solution
Exercise 2

Describe the clothing problem and two attempted solutions, and the reaction to them.

→ Solution
Exercise 3

Rewrite the claim "the bicycle liberated women" in a way a careful historian would accept.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

  • Women riders: mainly from the 1890s on the safety bicycle
  • Dress: divided skirts, bloomers, the Rational Dress Society (check)
  • Quotation: attributed to Susan B. Anthony, 1896 (check)
  • Wider effects: work, leisure, roads
  • Method: weigh big claims