The surprising history of women and bicycling

It's not about the bike or the bloomers

That’s Kittie Knox top center and Tillie Anderson on her right. Dottie Farnsworth is bottom left.

"Yes, I'll tell you what I think of bicycling," she said, leaning forward and laying a hand on my arm. "I think it has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood."

—Susan B. Anthony to Nellie Bly in 1896

I thought I was was going to write just about bicycling and women’s fashion and how the popularity of the bicycle meant women could start wearing pants. But I started digging in and reading up I realized that this is more than a story about bikes, skirts, bloomers and leggings. The real story is about how women’s cycling was a popular, promising spectator sport until men blatantly forced them out. It wasn’t just cycling, either. This is also a story about women’s bodies and women’s sports. We talk about what she was wearing as a distraction from what she was doing—and how it threatened the division between men and women.

Let’s start with an extremely brief history of the bicycle and women

Women were riding the earliest iterations of the bicycle. Whether it was the velocipede, high-wheel, or the Ordinary, women figured out how to ride, what to wear that wouldn’t get caught in the wheels and then they started racing. But battles raged over whether women could or should ride or not. Interestingly, courtship rituals came to the rescue. Young men enjoyed long, leisurely bike rides through the country wanted to bring their sweethearts along. So in the 1870s and early 1880s, a special bike was made just for the ladies. It was the tricycle.** It had two large wheels, a place for a lady to sit between them, and a smaller wheel in front. Women also formed clubs with their fellow lady cyclists.

A woman on a velocipede (more here), a woman on her tricycle, and lady racers on their high-wheel bicycles in completely fabulous outfits.

And then came the rise of the safety bicycle, which is the one that looks like what we all ride today. It was affordable and comfortable and led to the bicycle boom of the 1890s. Now men and women alike could take off on long bike rides, get around town and even start racing.

What bloomers have to do with it

Quite simply it is hard to ride a bike in the traditional female dress of the 19^th century. The long skirts had a tendency to get caught in gears and wheels, leading to crashes. At best, they got dirty. It was hard to breathe in a corset when just sitting around in the drawing room, never mind going on a century ride through the countryside.

This was the moment dress reformers had been waiting decades for. Finally, people wanted fashionable alternative to traditional women’s dress! As a result of the bicycling craze, and especially as a result of more women riding, hemlines did get shorter. Some women adopted the Bloomer outfit, made famous by Amelia Bloomer, which consisted of a short dress layered over long pants. Others adopted split or divided skirts. As the years passed and more women cycled, skirts became shorter, though they were always worn over something. They were paired with jaunty jackets. Women who ride bikes in circuses wore even skimpier outfits. Eventually, the skirts were ditched and women just wore the pants/bloomers/knickerbockers.

People didn’t just worry about what women wore on the bike. They feared that the bike would effect women’s health, particularly that it would ruin their ability to have children. Some people worried that women might have orgasms from the bicycle seat, which is why lady bikes were often designed to keep the rider in an upright position rather than leaning forward over the handlebars.

Despite all the concerns, women still rode and raced and crowds cheered them on as they did it.

Women didn’t just ride bikes on dates, they raced

Soon enough, both men and women cyclists were off to the races—together. In the 1880s Louise Armaindo helped turn women’s bicycle racing into an “exciting spectacle,” writes April Streeter in her book Women on Wheels: The Scandalous Untold Stories of Women in Cycling. All around the country, velodromes were built specifically for cycling races. Of course men raced…but so did women. There was Kittie Knox, a biracial woman who rode and raced. Dottie Farnsworth (“the American Whirlwind”) had an ongoing feud with Tillie Anderson (the seamstress who conquered bike racing), as they frequently raced and Dottie was always coming in second to Tillie.

Read this, imagine it, and try to stop your heart from racing with excitement:

In a six-day race in Chicago in 1896, Tillie and Dottie were bike by bike to the last laps, until Tillie pulled ahead by one-seventeenth of a mile in the home stretch, receiving a “boisterous” ovation. In a six-day race in 1897, Tillie had to spurt for the entire last hour to keep just ahead of Dottie as well as Helen Baldwin. All three had 264 miles and 14 laps and Tillie cycled full-speed and flat out to nose ahead the other two just at the finish.

But some men had a problem with the ladies racing. It was “visually displeasing” and “morally questionable.” Streeter writes about a former racer who lead the rules department of the League of American Wheelman (LAW). He believed that lady racing ruined the reputation of male cycling—after all, if ladies did it, how impressive could it be? So he urged LAW to “blacklist” the velodromes that supported women’s races. Cyclist Margaret Gast participated in “century” rides and rode for thousands and thousands of miles. And then men deemed it “improper, immoral, and illegal to make such an exhibition on the public highways” and banned “continuous century performances” by women.

[The showrunner in me is SCREAMING for a movie about the lady cyclists of the 1890s, done in the style of A League of their Own.]

But still, women raced whenever and however they could. The women who did so were not “ladies of the leisure class”. Most were lower class women who used “their athleticism to survive and develop physically and financially.” With the LAW blacklists, it became harder for them to make a living from racing. It became harder to do, harder to watch.

When we talk about the history of women in cycling, the name Annie Londonderry often comes up first. She embarked on a solo bike round around the world—and mostly managed it. (Turns out she was a young mom of three and look what moms have to do to get a little alone time, sheesh!). Annie Londonderry is often “the one” we talk about when we talk about historical women cycling. And good for her—she deserves it! What a feat of strength and marketing. But Annie, as a lone stunt woman, is an example of “woman-washing”— finding one lone woman to celebrate for her daring, especially if her achievement doesn’t disrupt our understanding of the status quo.

Annie and her solo ride doesn’t disrupt our understanding of women in sports in the same way that the fact of thousands of people turned out to watch women’s cycling races in the 1890s does.

When we talk about the history of women in cycling, we talk about what she was wearing. The real story, I think, is that there was a vibrant burgeoning sport of women cycling and men purposely quashed it.

This isn’t just about cycling.

******

When I was growing up, I distinctly remember being told that the reason women’s professional sports were not a thing was because no one wanted to watch women play sports. The teacher who told me this clearly did not know about U.S. Women’s Soccer, Caitlin Clark and women’s basketball or Nettie Honeyball and the British Ladies Football Club of 1890s. To be fair, I only just learned about it myself.

The story is this: In London, in 1895, a woman named Nettie Honeyball (contender for best pseudonym of all time) and Lady Florence Dixie started placing ads in newspapers for a woman’s football team. The team they assembled was comprised of mostly middle-class women. Their first match had ten to twelve thousand people in the stands. For reasons, the league didn’t last very long, even though it’s matches were incredibly successful.

[The showrunner in me is SCREAMING for a season of Ted Lasso where he goes back in time and coaches the ladies football team in 1895.]

But then in 1917, women’s football made a comeback. Again, people packed the stands to cheer on the women. But it couldn’t last. To quote Wikipedia:

Despite being more popular than some men's football events (one match saw a 53,000 strong crowd),women's football in England was halted in December 1921 when The Football Association outlawed the playing of the game on association members' pitches, the FA stating that "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged."

By “despite being more popular” I think they mean “because it was more popular.”

Fifty-three thousand people turned up to watch teams of women play soccer—a game of strength, endurance, strategy, teamwork and play. They did so in an era before cameras, too, so it was pretty impossible to make this about their outfits. Fifty-three thousand people bought tickets and gave an afternoon of their lives to cheer on women. Playing. Sports. In the 1920s.

Tens of thousands of people bought tickets and gave up an afternoon to cheer on women racing on bicycles and playing football. In the 1890s.

People have always wanted to watch women play sports.

I was lucky enough to grow up going to our local velodrome to watch the men and women race. I still remember the warm summer nights, the thundering of people’s hands on the barricade as the cyclists whizzed past, the sound of the bell signaling the final lap and the announcer’s voice climbing with frantic excitement as someone pulled out of the pack and sprinted to try and take the lead. It was a beautiful moment, thrilling every time, whether it was men or women racing.

I can’t help but imagine what our world would be like if girls grew up seeing stadiums full of people cheering for women’s sports and teamwork instead being served narratives about competing with each other for boys. Imagine what our world would be like if the Male Football Association could handle a little competition from the girls. Imagine if we had all learned to cheer each other on.

For hundreds of years we have made conversations about women in sports about the outfits, propriety, and what it will do to their reproductive capabilities. There is something even more threatening about women in sports: it questions the notion of male physical dominance that serves as the foundation for patriarchy. People quibbled over what she was wearing as a way to distract and from what she was doing.

And what was she doing?

Breaking all the “rules” to have the time of her life.

P.S.

** There was a moment in 1876 when Belva Lockwood was cycling around Washington D.C. in a big tricycle. She was running errands for her legal firm (she was one of the first female lawyers in the country), running a boarding house and also running for president. Everyone was in an uproar over the red stockings she wore which people caught a glimpse of while she cycled. Was it really about the stockings? Or the fact that a working mom was biking solo around town, blazing a path for future working mothers, female lawyers and presidential candidates?

** It’s not just cycling or soccer, it’s baseball too. I enjoyed this NPR interview with Kaitlyn Tiffany about her new article in The Atlantic, Why Aren’t Women Allowed to Play Baseball?

** You can still check out races at my local Velodrome! The Valley Preferred Cycling Center has regular races and opportunities for regular riders including Wednesdays for women only and PeeWee Peddlers for kids on Saturday mornings.

** Years ago, I wrote a feature for Bicycling magazine about Suffragist Frances Willard and how she learned to ride a bike. Check it out: How a 175 Year-Old Woman Taught Me To Ride a Bicycle.