ON YOUR BIKES, CYCLING SEXISTS!

Revolutions: How Women Changed The World On Two Wheels Hannah Ross

When the male student body at Cambridge protested against a proposal to let women take degrees in 1897, there was one image that perfectly symbolised the hated prospect of female advancement: the crowd hung an effigy of a woman riding a bike over the market square. After the motion was defeated, they tore down the model and ripped it to pieces, then delivered what was left as a message to all-female college Newnham.

Why such rage at the idea of a woman on two wheels? Because, explains Hannah Ross in this tour through cycling’s female history, women’s liberation has been pedal-powered since the first modern-style bikes appeared in the late 19th Century. Steam trains could take you only where they were already going. Horses required stabling and feeding. A bike, though, meant freedom, especially for women. Ross quotes one magazine, which wrote that ‘for men the bicycle was “merely a new toy”, but for women it was “a steed upon which they rode into a new world”.’

And that steed demanded a new wardrobe. Although many women continued to struggle in cumbersome skirts and stabbing corsets as they rode, the bike helped to speed the adoption of more comfortable ‘rational dress’ for women, including bloomers. It also meant that women could display their physical prowess, and disprove the suspicion that strength was ‘unladylike’: Victorian racer Tillie Anderson’s legs were examined by a doctor for signs of manliness, and medically declared ‘beautiful’. No wonder so many suffragettes were keen cyclists.

The connection between cycling and feminism goes on to this day: Ross visits a charity in London that teaches women refugees how to ride and gives them their own bikes, providing them with precious independence. But women have been written out of the story of cycling, says Ross, and their pioneering achievements forgotten; cycling’s most prestigious races, including the Tour de France, remain men-only.

This is a subject full of fascinating detail and compelling characters (Annie Kopchovsky, who attempted a round-the-world ride in 1894 but seems to have put more effort into her tall tales than her actual miles, could be the heroine of a Wes Anderson film). It’s unforgivable, then, that the book is so pedestrian. Ross weaves unsteadily between thematic and chronological structure, losing the narrative in a list of dry cycling facts and never quite breathing life into the extraordinary personalities of the women brave enough to ride when the world told them not to.