How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way)
By Sue Macy
$18.95, ages 8 and up, 96 pages
For women at the close of the 19th Century, the bicycle was like a silent steed ready to carry them away.
It gave them courage to break free of society's rigid hold and carve out their own dreams, according to this fascinating account by award-winning Macy.
"Imagine a population imprisoned by their very clothing: the stiff corsets, heavy skirts...," she writes. "And how liberated they must have been as they pedaled their wheels toward new horizons."
With the arrival of the high-wheeler and later bicycles in America, women gained a degree of mobility they'd never known and gradually, often unconsciously began to try things that only men were allowed to do.
The female cyclist "did not have to be born again in some mysterious fashion, becoming a strange creature, a 'new woman,'" Munsey's Magazine suggested in 1896. "She is more like the 'eternal feminine,' who has taken on wings, and who is using them with an ever increasing delight in her new power."
A few years later, a French cycling poster echoed this perception, showing an Athenian-looking woman with angel wings standing beside her two-wheeler.
