Women on Wheels by Streeter April;

Author:Streeter, April;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing LLC
Published: 2021-03-18T21:27:13+00:00

Londonderry Annie

In the last five years of the nineteenth century, so many women rode bicycles that daring feats became more and more common. It was part of the culture and the fin de siecle times for men and women, and especially those trying for an economic jackpot, to take chances, dares, attempt outlandish feats. But even so, the bravado of Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, known as Annie Londonderry, seemed extraordinary.

Annie gained copious press recognition when she started to ride around the world on a bicycle in the summer of 1894. A married mother of three, Annie left her children and her husband, and her job selling advertising for Boston newspapers, for a 15-month bicycle trek from July 1894 to October 1895. Annie told newspapers the purpose of the trip was to win a $10,000 bet. The evidence for this wager is rather thin, according to her biographer and grand-nephew Peter Zheutlin. Zheutlin thoroughly researched Annie’s travels and concluded that she was not only a great adventurer—gutsy, bold, and inventive—she was also a superior marketer, larding her tales with fanciful, mostly invented detail.

Annie, like Louise Armaindo before her, was practicing press relations and that era’s version of social media. She got the Londonderry water company to sponsor her as she biked, using Londonderry as her surname; she sold postcards with her picture to generate cash; and she even created a magic lantern presentation with staged photos highlighting dramatic (fabricated) moments of her journey. She knew instinctively that people were fascinated in what she wore while on her bicycle journey. Over the course of her 15 months away from home she moved gradually from traditional heavy skirts and undergarments to a bloomer costume to an even further pared down, men’s style pants-and-jacket ensemble.

Zheutlin began to research his great-aunt’s ride in 2003 and found many discrepancies between newspaper reports of Annie’s trek by bike and what he could discern as the true steps of Annie’s voyage. Her transportation included quite a bit of train and ship travel, and many fewer miles on the bike than what was reported. Many of the stories that she told in her presentations couldn’t be corroborated, or had lots of contradictory details when fact checked by Zheutlin. She eventually, after some exhausting stretches, managed to return to Chicago, and wrote a series of newspaper articles about her trip. She started to write a book (though didn’t finish it), stayed married to her husband, and settled back to life as wife and mother. In spite of the fanciful spin and tall tales, this globe-trotting woman bicyclist still managed something extraordinary, and came back with a great tale to tell of adventure and many miles of bicycling. Annie died in 1947.

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