Wild Women of Boston by Dina Vargo

Author:Dina Vargo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

This poster from Columbia Bicycles from 1895 shows the correct upright posture for women to use while riding, if not impractical clothing. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library.

In 1895, she started her own journal called The Wheelwoman, publishing from an office on Tremont Street overlooking the Boston Common. She was the undisputed leader of women cyclists, and although she didn’t necessarily discount equality for the sexes, her interest was much more founded on the basis of women’s health and, ultimately, their beauty. Susan B. Anthony is famously quoted as saying, “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel… the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.” Mary thought that health was more important than all other considerations in a woman’s life, including education, and that bicycling was the best way to a healthy life. A healthy body by way of bicycling would “erase the tired looks in their eyes and the tense lines around their mouths.”

Mary was fighting an uphill ride. Not everyone embraced bicycling for women. As sure as it was becoming a popular pastime in the middle and upper classes, it most surely had detractors. Publications lampooned women cyclists for being “Amazons”—in other words, unfeminine and unattractive. “Medical professionals” claimed that riding and such vigorous activity would ruin women’s reproductive health—a claim that would not be put to rest until almost one hundred years later, when another wild woman ran the Boston Marathon. Furthermore, medical authorities believed that bicycling could lead women to experiment with unchaste behavior, partly due to the new fashion of going with dates on unchaperoned rides about town and partly in a more intimate manner due to straddling the bicycle seat. Talk about a hot-button issue!

But some things never change. Just as some of today’s women feel conflicted about using the term “feminism” to describe their beliefs in equality for the sexes, Mary drew a line regarding how far she thought women should go. Bloomers or knickerbockers were far, far over the line for her. She told the New York Times, “If there is one thing I hate…it is a masculine woman. It has made my heart sore to see the women who have been putting on knickerbockers…and riding and scorching with the men. It has made wheeling just another way for a woman to make a fool of herself, bringing cycling into disrepute, and making herself the laughing stock of the people.”

As bicycling grew ever more popular for women, so did the topic of what they should or could wear. Even Mary admitted that it was tough going to ride with the traditional long skirts and corsets of the day. She used her magazine to promote a new kind of adjustable skirt that could be made an appropriate length for daily wear and shortened for bike rides.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.