Women with bicycles, circa 1890s - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

Women with bicycles, circa 1890s - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 05/04/2016 - 2:40pm

This May, I'm celebrating National Bike Month with the same activity I engage in most every month: riding my bike to work. For me, cycling means freedom from the hassles of public transportation, but for women in the late 19th and early 20th century, it represented a different kind of liberation.

According to historians, the cycling craze of the 1890s led to a loosening of societal restrictions on women -- both through geographic mobility that allowed them to expand their horizons past their own neighborhoods, and physical mobility that inspired less constricting and more practical fashions such as bloomers. This inevitably led to a backlash from conservative doctors and legislators, who masked unease over these changes with claims about cycling's potential to damage women's health -- a concern handily dismissed in an 1894 article in the Chicago Daily News:

"When a 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 10 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 the 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." [source]

View more historic images of cyclists at CARLI Digital Collections here.

Written by Jen Wolfe, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Newberry Library

For more information about this and other CARLI Digital Collections, visit http://collections.carli.illinois.edu

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