Around the World on Two Wheels

by Peter Zheutlin

  So popular was cycling that, by 1896, even Madison Square Garden proved too small to accommodate all those who wanted to display their wares at the Great Bicycle Exhibition. Balconies and three tiers of terraces for promenading above the Garden’s floor were constructed to expand the exhibition space. When the Garden’s electric lights were turned on, the effect, wrote one reporter, “was brilliant.” People in masquerade, human freaks, and other means were employed to attract visitors to the displays. “A Chinaman presides on the platform of a wheel known by its yellow frame. An Indian with his war paint on; a swell; a giant negro; a dime museum midget; a quartet of jubilee singers; a fat boy; young men in racing costume; allegorical figures that suggest the names of standard wheels; [and] a rambling tramp” contributed to the circuslike atmosphere that drew huge crowds to the Garden.

  Cycling in the last decade of the nineteenth century was nothing less than “a general intoxication, an eruption of exuberance like a seismic tremor that shook the economic and social foundations of society and rattled the windows of its moral outlook.” Nowhere was this more evident than in the role of the “wheel” in the changing lives of American women. Indeed, the women’s movement of the 1890s and the cycling craze became so inextricably intertwined that in 1896 Susan B. Anthony told the New York World’s Nellie Bly that bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

  Women, though taking to the sport as never before, represented an enormous, relatively untapped market Colonel Pope was determined to exploit. If a woman could make it around the world on a Columbia, the public relations value would be incalculable.

  IT WASN’T ALWAYS easy for women to ride bicycles; the technology needed to evolve to pave the way for women such as Annie to seize the bicycle as a tool of personal and political power. Before the development of chain technology, which allowed a cyclist to transfer pedal power to the rear wheel, bicycle designers increased the speed by increasing the size of the front wheel to which the pedals were attached. The typical Ordinary, as these high-wheelers were known, had front wheels as large as five feet in diameter so the machine would cover more ground with each pedal revolution. It required extraordinary athleticism just to mount an Ordinary, let alone ride one, and accidents were common. Steering was difficult and even a small obstacle, a rut in the road or a large stone, could send the Ordinary pedaler, mounted many feet above the ground, head first over the front handlebars. Indeed, learning how to “take a header” safely was an essential skill.

  In addition to facing these common hazards, women had the additional problem of mounting and riding an Ordinary in the long, heavy skirts that they were expected to wear in public. Though some women were racing Ordinaries as early as the 1870s, and a women’s version of the bicycle existed that seated the rider lower and further back, an Ordinary required more strength and athleticism than most women of the time could manage, as they were not, as a general rule, otherwise engaged in athletic pursuits.

  In the late 1870s, the first so-called Safety bicycles appeared. Safety bicycles had wheels of equal size and a chain drive (a few models had a chainless “shaft drive”) that transferred power from the pedals to the rear wheel. At first derided by experienced wheelmen as designed for old men and women, the Safety quickly proved the superior design, both faster and more stable than the Ordinary, and remains the basis for bicycle design today.

  Unlike the Ordinary, the Safety, ironically, was a bicycle ordinary people, including women, could easily ride. The Ordinary quickly became obsolete, and the Safety ushered in the cycling craze of the 1890s. “The safety bicycle fills a much-needed want for women in any station of life,” said The Bearings, a cycling periodical, in October 1894. “It knows no class distinction, is within reach of all, and rich and poor alike have the opportunity of enjoying this popular and healthful exercise.”

  AS CYCLING’S POPULARITY exploded, a new breed of woman was making her mark in the 1890s. The “New Woman” was the term used to describe women who broke with convention by working outside the home, or eschewed the traditional role of wife and mother, or became politically active in the suffrage movement or other social issues. The New Woman saw herself as the equal of men, and the bicycle helped her assert herself as such.

  With the advent of the bicycle, women not only gained physical mobility that broadened their horizons beyond the neighborhoods in which they lived, but they discovered a new-found sense of freedom of movement, a freedom previously circumscribed by the cumbersome fashions of the Victorian era as well as by Victorian sensibilities. The women who raced Ordinaries in the 1870s often did so in risqué garments that exposed a daring amount of flesh. Arms and legs were often bare and the outfits were low-cut at the breast. Such scandalous dress was criticized by many who could not abide a spectacle that combined overt sexuality and physical exertion by women. Yet these women were the vanguard of a dress reform movement catalyzed in no small measure by the increasing popularity of the bicycle. They simply wanted clothing better suited to the pursuit than was their traditional Victorian garb. The restrictive clothing of the era—corsets, long, heavy, multilayered skirts worn over petticoats or hoop, and long-sleeved shirts with high collars, the clothing in which Annie began her journey—inhibited freedom of movement and seemed to symbolize the constricted lives women of those times were expected to lead. Such clothing was inimical to even modest forms of exercise or exertion. Cycling required a more practical, rational form of dress, and so the restrictive skirts and corsets gradually gave way to bloomers—baggy trousers, sometimes called a divided skirt, cinched at the knee. Although bloomers first appeared decades earlier, and a major social battle was waged over their propriety, the cycling craze practically mandated changes in women’s attire for any woman who wanted to ride.

  “[C]lothing for sports engaged a wide variety of women in a discussion about their relationship with their garments,” according to women’s history scholar Sarah Gordon. “At a time when mainstream women rarely challenged fashion’s dictates, the novelty of sports offered an opportunity to rethink women’s clothing.”

  Annie eventually formed strong views on the matter. “Miss Londonderry expressed the opinion that the advent of the bicycle will create a reform in female dress that will be beneficial,” reported the Omaha World Herald, when the cyclist passed through there in August 1895. “She believes that in the near future all women, whether of high or low degree, will bestride the wheel, except possibly the narrow-minded, long-skirted, lean and lank element.”

  But dress reform was not a simple matter of practical adaptation; it rewrote long-standing definitions of modesty and femininity, and became a hotly contested moral issue. Cycling attire, and indeed the popularity of cycling among women, forever altered public perceptions of female athleticism and proper female behavior. The prim and proper gentility expected of women yielded to an acceptance that they, too, could exert themselves on the bicycle while dressed sensibly for the activity and not only retain, but even enhance, their femininity. Once hidden under yards of fabric, women cyclists shed their old skins and emerged, quite literally, as “new women.”

  In the course of her own journey, both geographic and personal, Annie would run the sartorial gamut as she transformed herself into a new woman: she started in long skirts and a traditional blouse and jacket, took to bloomers in Chicago, and later would eventually don a man’s riding suit for much of the trip, an evolution that symbolized the larger changes in women’s lives as expressed in the clothing they wore. Her choice of dress shocked some. For example, when Annie was in Phoenix in June 1895, one elderly woman was so shocked to see a female cyclist in “men’s pants” that she ran horrified into a nearby shop, muttering about the “depravity and boldness of the nineteenth century girl.” Cycling, and the dress reform that accompanied it, challenged traditional gender norms and “provided a space where women actively contested and rethought femininity,” and there is no better example of the phenomenon than Annie.

/>   That bike riding might be sexually stimulating for women was also a real concern to many in the 1890s. It was thought that straddling a saddle combined with the motion required to propel a bicycle would lead to arousal. So-called hygienic saddles began to appear, saddles with an open space where a woman’s genitalia would ordinarily make contact with the seat. High stems and upright handlebars, as opposed to the more aggressively positioned “drop” handlebars, also were thought to reduce the risk of female sexual stimulation by reducing the angle at which a woman would be forced to ride.

  Some critics warned the bicycle was harmful to a woman’s health, and all kinds of arguments were thrown up to try and discourage women from taking to the wheel. The fragility and sensitivity of the female organism was a common theme. An article in the Iowa State Register, typical of the times, warned that exposure during cycling to wet and cold “may suppress or render irregular and fearfully painful the menses, and perhaps sow the seeds for future ill health.” The manufacturers of various “cures” capitalized on fears that cycling could injure the kidneys, liver, and urinary tract, some even suggesting that what might begin as a minor side effect from the vibrations of the wheel could eventually lead to death. Warner’s Safe Cure made these claims in advertisements designed to look like ordinary newspaper articles. In the September 21, 1895, editions of the Chicago Times-Herald and the Kansas City Star, for example, Warner’s Safe Cure didn’t just warn women; men, too, were said to be at risk, and Warner’s was the cure.

  But the constant warnings about cycling’s ill effects on women throughout the early 1890s also brought forth pointed rebukes, such as this one in the Chicago Daily News: “When woman wants to learn anything or do anything useful or even have any fun there is always someone to solemnly warn her that it is her duty to keep well. Meanwhile in many states she can work in factories ten hours a day, she can stand behind counters in badly ventilated stores from 8 o’clock to 6, she can bend over the sewing machine for about 5 cents an hour and no one cares enough to protest. But when these same women, condemned to sedentary lives indoors, find a cheap and delightful way of getting the fresh air and exercise they need so sorely there is a great hue and cry about their physical welfare.” Clearly, with the advent of cycling as a recreation for women, the gauntlet over woman’s rights had been thrown down.

  For leaders of the woman’s movement, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the battle over women’s dress, waged in large part over cycling attire, was a critical part of the greater struggle for sexual equality and even the right to vote. “Why, pray tell me, hasn’t a woman as much right to dress to suit herself as a man?” Anthony asked a reporter in 1895. “[T]he stand she is taking in the matter of dress is no small indication that she has realized that she has an equal right with a man to control her own movements.” Stanton, sometimes referred to as “the first new woman,” also forcefully defended a woman’s right to dress as she pleased, a right asserted in the context of cycling. “Men found that flying coat tails were ungainly and that baggy trousers were in the way [when cycling] so they changed their dress to suit themselves and we didn’t interfere,” Stanton told a journalist in 1895. “They have taken in every reef and sail and appear in skin tight garments. We did not bother our heads about their cycling clothes, and why should they meddle with what we want to wear? We ask nothing more of them than did the devils in Scripture—‘Let us alone.’”

  Despite Stanton’s admonition that men “let us alone” on the question of cycling attire, even the male-dominated medical profession weighed in. At the Mississippi Valley Medical Congress in Detroit in September 1895, cycling was endorsed as healthful exercise for men and women, but the delegates derided bloomers as “something outrageous” and “unanimously declared [the garment] to be an abomination and the cause of lowering their wearers in the eyes of spectators.” No medical reason was cited. In Norwich, New York, in 1895, a group of young men signed a written pledge promising not to associate with any woman who wore bloomers and to use “all honorable means to render such costumes unpopular in the community where I reside.” Their goal, never realized, was to build their movement into a “national anti-bloomer brigade.” Their effort was courageous, said the Chicago Sunday Times-Herald, tongue in cheek, for “[t]he wearers of the bloomers are usually young women who have minds of their own and tongues that know how to talk,” a description that would have fit Annie to a T.

  The issue of women’s cycling attire became fodder for cartoonists, as well. In the August 25, 1895, edition of the Omaha World Herald, a cartoon published during Annie’s visit to Omaha was a caricature of Egyptian hieroglyphics; it depicted several Egyptian men at the “Rameses Club” watching with bemusement as a woman cycles by in baggy pajama-like trousers. “The New Woman of Ancient Egypt,” says the top caption; “First Appearance of Bloomers on the Streets of Karnak,” reads the bottom one. Another cartoon, published during Annie’s visit to San Francisco, showed a woman whose loose-fitting bloomers had been filled with air by the rushing wind, her legs and hindquarters floating above the bike. But for her grip on the handlebars she’d have sailed away. “Her bloomers were too loose,” stated the caption, implying that the woman, too, might be loose.

  As Annie rode, she encountered all of these preconceptions and misconceptions about both the sport and its attire, and became a figure onto which men and women could project their hopes and their fears about changing gender roles.

  THE SOCIAL CHANGES wrought by the bicycle were hardly limited to women’s fashion, however. A woman with a bicycle no longer had to depend on a man for transportation—she was free to come and go at will. She experienced a new kind of physical power made possible by the speed of the vehicle. The bicycle imparted a parity with men that was both new and heady. In short, “more and more women came to regard the cycle as a freedom machine.”

  Indeed, mastery of the bicycle as a metaphor for women’s mastery over their own lives was the message of Frances Willard’s 1895 book, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. Willard was one of the most famous women of her day, a leading suffragist and founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which had a mass following of independent-minded, often politically active women. At age fifty-three, Willard resolved to learn to ride a bicycle because, as she wrote, she “wanted to help women to a wider world…from natural love of adventure—a love long hampered and impeded…[and] from a love of acquiring this new implement of power and literally putting it underfoot.”

  “The occasional denunciation of the pastime as unwomanly, is fortunately lost in the general approval that a new and wholesome recreation has been found, whose pursuit adds joy and vigor to the dowry of the race,” wrote Marguerite Merington of cycling in Scribner’s Magazine in June 1895. “Having reached these conclusions, the onlooker is drawn by the irresistible force of the stream. She borrows, hires, or buys a wheel and follows tentatively. Her point of view is forever after changed; long before practice has made her an expert she is an enthusiast, ever ready to proselyte, defend—or ride!” And ride they did. Between 1891 and 1896, it is estimated that the number of female cyclists grew between one hundred and four hundred times, with 1.3 to 3.2 million female cyclists in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany by the end of that period.

  Annie was hardly the only woman taking to the highways on a bicycle. A few, such as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, had already made lengthy journeys by wheel. Pennell, a writer with a strong interest in women’s rights, and her husband, Joseph Pennell, spent their honeymoon in 1884 riding a tandem bicycle from London to Canterbury. Later that year, the Pennells rode a tandem tricycle from Florence to Rome, arousing great curiosity along the way. Two years later, in 1886, the Pennells, now astride Safety bicycles, toured Eastern Europe.

  Fanny Bullock Workman of Worcester, Massachusetts, also made long-distance tours by bicycle with her husband, physician William Hunter Workman. For ten years beginning in 1889, the Workmans toured Europe
, Africa, and Asia by bicycle. Unlike Annie, however, Fanny Workman was independently wealthy and, like Elizabeth Pennell, always traveled with her husband. Mrs. Workman always rode in proper Victorian attire, a high-necked blouse with full sleeves and “voluminous skirts” under which she wore a corset and a complete array of undergarments. In the spring of 1894, as Annie prepared to leave Boston, the Workmans were cycling 1,500 miles across the inhospitable terrain of Algeria. The following spring, as Annie was making her way down the California coast, the Workmans were riding 2,700 miles through Spain.

  In the summer of 1895, as Annie pedaled through the American West, another Boston woman, Mrs. J. M. Savage, was riding more than 5,400 miles in and around New England, including twelve “centuries”—rides of one hundred miles. By the following year, Boston women had formed no fewer than four cycling clubs of their own, since the vast majority of cycling clubs did not permit women members. Cycling was now a mass phenomenon and not the province of a few well-heeled women or even of the so-called New Woman. “[A]ll sorts and conditions of woman have enrolled themselves among [cycling’s] devotees,” said the Boston Daily Globe. “The timid woman has cast away her fear, the stickler for proprieties has overcome her scruples, and the conservative has become a radical advocate of the merits of the wheel—it looks as though the whole feminine world, which does nothing by halves and is ever ready to follow a popular fashion, had gone wheel mad.” Indeed, as many famous women joined the ranks of cyclists, the actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lillian Russell among them, it served to further accelerate the passion for cycling among women.