Women in the 1890s boldly ignored warnings that riding a bicycle could lead to their damnation.
In 1896, as the horse-and-buggy era drew to a close, newspaper offices across the country received an impassioned broadside from Charlotte Smith, the founder of the national Women’s Rescue League. “Bicycling by young women has helped to swell the ranks of reckless girls who finally drift into the standing army of outcast women of the United States,” Smith declared. “The bicycle is the devil’s advance agent morally and physically in thousands of instances.”
Smith, a 55-year-old Irish-American social reformer whose previous crusades included the creation of an all-female union for federal clerks and a lodging house in Boston for young working women, was convinced that riding a bicycle was a salacious pursuit that produced “immoral suggestions and imprudent associations both in language and dress.” She urged “all true women and clergymen to aid in denouncing the present bicycling craze by women as indecent and vulgar.”
The impassioned entreaty backfired. “Charlotte Smith has stirred up a great movement, as she desired,” reported the Washington Post on July 20, 1896, “but it is reacting upon her. No one favors her view of the situation.” That included members of the clergy whom Smith had been counting on for support. “I am heartily in favor of women riding the bicycle,” the Rev. Dr. Louis Albert Banks, a New York pastor, told the Brooklyn Eagle. “We have two bicycles for ladies in our house.”
Meanwhile, thousands of women were too busy pedaling through city parks and country meadows on newfangled two-wheelers with cushiony pneumatic tires to pay Smith much mind. During the previous decade, the annual production of bicycles nationwide had gone from 11,000 to more than a million. For women, cycling provided an unprecedented opportunity to leave the confines of home, shed some of the cumbersome clothing and social strictures of the era, and assert their independence. “To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play,” Munsey’s, the nation’s first mass market magazine, proclaimed in May 1896. “To women it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.”
Colonel Albert Pope, a Civil War veteran and Boston-based entrepreneur, launched the American bicycle industry when he introduced his Columbia-brand high wheelers in 1878. Equipped with a towering front wheel with a diameter of 48 inches or more and a tiny rear wheel, these so-called ordinary bicycles were a big improvement over the iron-tired “boneshakers” that had enjoyed a flash of popularity in the U.S. in the 1860s. But they still required riders to balance precipitously on a leather seat with only a handlebar to keep them from pitching forward onto the ground. Moreover, Pope’s high wheelers could not accommodate women dressed in skirts, and only a few females were audacious enough to ride in pants at that time.
Everything changed with the American debut in 1887 of “safety” bicycles, which featured two wheels of equal or almost equal diameter, designed to eliminate the dangers riders faced on high wheelers. The addition of a chain-and-sprocket mechanism attached to the pedals also improved speed and efficiency. W.E. Smith of Washington, D.C., was among the first to purchase a safety bicycle, and when his wife saw it, she decided she wanted to ride it. But the high bar between the seat and saddle got in the way of her skirt, so he replaced it with a center bar that swooped down low. In the process, he invented what came to be known as a women’s drop frame. Manufacturers quickly adopted Smith’s design, offering men’s and women’s models for most of their machines.
Despite the altered frame, women found it necessary to modify their style of dress in order to ride comfortably. Throughout much of the 19th century, women’s clothing seemed to be designed more for beauty and style than comfort and practicality. They wore corsets to cinch their waists and lift their chests, even though these garments tended to constrict their internal organs, leading to fainting spells and worse. They also wore long, full dresses with several layers of petticoats underneath, garments that weighed as much as 25 pounds and picked up cigar ends, discarded food, animal droppings and other detritus as they swept the ground. Such garments were impractical on a bicycle, and newspapers reported their fair share of clothing-related accidents and injuries. “I was skimming along like a bird, when there was an awful tug at my dress and a cracking sound,” an unnamed woman told the Sporting News in October 1891. “Before I knew what was the matter I found myself lying in the road with the safety on the top of me. My dress was so tightly wound round the crank bracket that I could not get up until I had got it free….It is quite certain that women run a great deal of risk over their dresses.”
Female cyclists came up with a variety of clothing solutions. Some turned to bloomers, the loose, ankle-length pantaloons that had been popular with women’s rights advocates in the 1850s before succumbing to critical disfavor. Others chose to ride in divided skirts, some of which included extra fabric that could be fastened to hide the bifurcated nature of the garment when modest cyclists walked to and from their rides. Still others rode in skirts and dresses that were narrower and shorter than their everyday costumes, sometimes with bloomers underneath. None of these choices pleased traditionalists, and all aroused passionate debate, often centering on whether the outfits made women look and/or act too masculine. Fashion magazines also entered the discussion, with Harper’s Bazar dismissing bloomers as an option in an 1896 issue: “Women are too anxious about their personal appearance to be willing to wear what their own eyes tell them is ugly.” While cyclists and their critics never settled on one perfect riding costume, the relaxed standards of the bicycle era did lead to lasting dress reform.
What women wore to ride their bicycles mattered because cycling was a very public—and social—activity. With the rise of industry in the 19th century and the move from a rural to an urban economy, American women had become increasingly confined to their homes. Even their dates with young men often took place in their parlors, under the watchful eyes of parental chaperones. Cycling allowed women to break free of their surroundings and meet friends and potential romantic partners without supervision. While observers such as Charlotte Smith feared that this new freedom would imperil women’s virtue, others celebrated the development. “Now and again a complaint arises of the narrowness of woman’s sphere,” wrote Marguerite Merington in an 1895 article in Scribner’s magazine. “For such disorder of the soul the sufferer can do no better than to flatten her sphere to a circle, mount it, and take to the road.”
Several leading feminists recognized the impact that cycling was having on women’s place in society. “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” said Susan B. Anthony in 1896. “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.” Her colleague, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was equally appreciative, writing frequently about cycling and even contributing an article on “The Era of the Bicycle” to an 1895 issue of the magazine American Wheelman. “The bicycle,” Stanton wrote, “will inspire women with more courage, self-respect and self-reliance and make the next generation more vigorous of mind and of body; for feeble mothers do not produce great statesmen, scientists and scholars.”
No feminist did more to promote cycling than Frances Willard, founder and longtime president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Willard learned to ride a bicycle in 1893, at age 53. Then she published a book about the epiphanies she had during the experience. “I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world, upon whose spinning wheel we must all learn to ride,” she wrote in A Wheel Within a Wheel. Willard explained that she took up cycling “from a pure love of adventure,” as well as “from a love of acquiring this new implement of power and literally putting it underfoot.” Her musings resonated with enough people to make her book a bestseller as bicycle fever in America peaked in 1895 and 1896.
By the turn of the century, Americans had become enamored with a new vehicle, the automobile, but thanks to the brief bicycle craze, the lives of women would never be the same.
Sue Macy is the author of Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way) (National Geographic, 2011).
Originally published in the October 2011 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
