America's Women by Gail Collins

Author:Gail Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

13

Turn of the Century:

The Arrival of the New Woman

“TO DEMONSTRATE PUBLICLY

THAT WOMEN HAVE LEGS”

In 1895, Frances Willard, the longtime head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote a little book called How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. It recounted how, at age fifty-three, she made herself “master of the most remarkable, ingenious and inspiring [vehicle] ever devised upon the planet.” Although written in a friendly, no-nonsense style, the book followed the temperance movement’s classic story line of error, enlightenment, and rebirth. Willard confessed to her readers that a decade before she would have found the idea of a woman cyclist “shocking.” But she had seen the light, and she urged her millions of female fans: “Go thou and do likewise.”

If there’s any symbol for the transformation that had occurred in the lives of American women as they approached the twentieth century, it ought to be the bicycle. The pictures of Willard tooling around in her long black skirt and high-necked blouse might remind modern readers of the villainous Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, pedaling off with Toto in her basket. But women who had spent their lives wrapped in corsets and weighed down by heavy skirts must have been thrilled to be able to go flying down the street on two wheels. “Wheeling” offered independence as well as speed, and it was not only respectable; it was fashionable. Lillian Russell began pedaling through Central Park on a gold-plated bike that Diamond Jim Brady gave her. Susan B. Anthony enthused that bicycling “did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

The whole nation was crazy about bicycling. By 1900 more than 10 million bikes were on the road, and every manufacturer offered a “lady’s model.” The undergarment industry quickly invented a cycling corset, but it never caught on. The Victorian standards of proper dress were not going to survive the wheeling generation. “A few years ago, no woman would dare venture on the street with a skirt that stopped above her ankles,” wrote an essayist in Scribners. But the bicycle, the writer said, “has given to all American womankind the liberty of dress for which reformers have been sighing for generations.” Lillian Russell confided to her fans (she confided just about everything) that her “wheeling costume consists of the regulation skirt and China silk bloomers with a long woolen shirt. I wear no corset while exercising.” Life noted approvingly in 1897 that “a large proportion of the bicycle girls look exceedingly well in bicycle clothes…. Not the least good thing the bicycle has done has been to demonstrate publicly that women have legs.”

Americans had entered a world in which drastic social changes could occur in a decade instead of requiring a generation. The bicycling craze took over the nation so quickly that people barely had time to go through the traditional soul-searching over whether cycling would make women nervous or endanger their reproductive systems. The Boston Rescue League, however, did claim that 30 percent of the fallen women who came seeking aid had been “bicycle riders at one time.

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