Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels, by Hannah Ross

JANE O’GRADY Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels

I’ll always keep my niece’s childhood drawing. She, her elder sister, her mother and I are cycling along, accompanied, in the sky above us, by a witch astride a broomstick. My niece could ride only –a tricycle at the time, but I felt she had the right idea – bikes, freedom, women and witchiness.

In Revolutions, Hannah Ross sketches the history of the bicycle, from its emergence in the late-19th century. At first confined to the rich and fashionable, it became, thanks to mass production, both a transport and a leisure-time activity for anyone – though women’s cycling was initially strongly resisted, and even today male cyclists outnumber female.

As the American magazine Munsey’s pointed out in 1896, what was ‘merely a new toy’ for men was for women ‘a steed upon which they rode into a new world’. The American suffragist Susan B Anthony said the bicycle did ‘more to emancipate women than anything else in the world’.

Even the physical stance that cycling requires was one of rebellion. There could be little question of women riding side-saddle (though that was mooted). They had to straddle their bikes, a position already defying the impediment of skirts and bustles. It was inveighed against as liable to lead to immodesty, promiscuity, infertility, de-sexing, ‘bicycle hump’ and ‘bicycle face’. Saddles were invented that supposedly prevented sexual stimulation (‘You do not straddle the Duplex saddle’), but they did not catch on.

The already existing Rational Dress Society which campaigned against corsets had a huge boost. ‘Rationals’ or ‘freedom dress’ included specially hitchable skirts and bifurcated garments, such as ‘the billowy Turkish-style trousers’ popularised by Amelia Bloomer.

Female cyclists were shouted at, pelted with stones and sometimes pulled off their saddles. In 1897 an effigy of a woman on a bike dressed in blouse and bloomers was hung from a window in the Cambridge market-place as a protest against women’s being able to gain full degrees at the university (which they wouldn’t be able to do until 1948, half a century later).

Some readers may find Ross’s account of the competitive side of cycling rather repetitive. Of course it is marvellous that women competed in cycle races. The first was in 1868. A women’s international six-day race was won by a Brit, in 1895. In 1894, Annie Kopchovsky, a JewishLatvian immigrant, cycled round the world, if her account is to be believed; Juliana Buhring certainly did it in 2012. Women cycled up the Alps and the mountains of Kashmir.

But I found it difficult to distinguish between the fairly similar feats achieved by Tillie (‘the Terrible’), Billie (Fleming), Dottie (‘Red Bird’) and the rest. There are, however, fascinating glimpses of Christabel Pankhurst. Her bike badge displayed a winged female figure sounding a trumpet. She made no concessions to her sister Sylvia’s lesser stamina.