Speed for escaping chaperones. Less burdensome clothes for riding. The bicycle's little-known role in equal rights.
As much as we love bike culture
and everything bikes stand for, we may have underestimated the profound
significance of the bicycle as a cultural agent of change. Thanks to a
brilliant new book, we no longer do. National Geographic's Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way)
tells the riveting story of how the two-wheel wonder pedaled forward
the emancipation of women in late-19th-century America and
radically redefined the normative conventions of femininity.
"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. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world." ~ Munsey's Magazine, 1896
A follow-up to Sue Macy's excellent Winning Ways: A Photohistory of American Women in Sports,
published nearly 15 years ago, the book weaves together fascinating
research, rare archival images, and historical quotes that bespeak the
era's near-comic fear of the cycling revolution. ("The bicycle is the
devil's advance agent morally and physically in thousands of
instances.")
