It was denounced as immoral, it forced a change in what women were allowed to wear, and the doctors invented a disease
The Cyclist holds a 4.7 from seventeen hundred and sixty-four people, charges twenty to forty pounds, and that is a genuinely excellent number on a genuinely serious sample.
And the machine in the name was revolutionary, and not for the reasons people assume.
It was a freedom machine
Because in the 1890s, a bicycle gave a woman something she had essentially never had.
The ability to travel, alone, wherever she liked, without asking anybody.
No horse to keep. No carriage to hire. No chaperone required by the mechanics of the thing. No driver who would report where she had been.
Susan B Anthony said so
Explicitly, and in print, at the time.
She said the bicycle had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world – and that she stood and rejoiced every time she saw a woman ride past on one.
Because it gave her a feeling of self-reliance, and the picture of untrammelled womanhood.
That is not a modern reinterpretation. It is what a leading suffragist said while it was happening.
And it forced the clothes to change
Which is the practical mechanism, and it is the part that caused the fighting.
Because you cannot ride a bicycle in a corset and a floor-length skirt with heavy petticoats. It is dangerous. The fabric catches in the chain.
So women wore bloomers, and divided skirts – and the rational dress movement grew directly out of it.
And they were abused in the street for it. Stones were thrown.
And the doctors invented a disease
Which is the detail that tells you everything.
Because medical men warned – seriously, in journals – of bicycle face: a permanent, hardened, strained expression that cycling would supposedly fix onto a woman’s features.
And they warned of exhaustion, and nervous damage, and effects on the reproductive organs.
None of it was true. All of it was published.
And nobody was worried about the men.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and thirteen hundred and thirty articles.
When somebody invents a reason why a group of people cannot do a thing, the reason is almost never the reason.
And it broadened the gene pool
Which is a real claim, made seriously.
Because before the bicycle, a person in a village married somebody from that village, or the next one – because that was as far as you could go and return in a day.
And the bicycle extended the radius enormously.
A machine for going to a dance in the next parish.
And the safety bicycle is the design
Which is the thing that made all of it possible.
Because the penny-farthing – the enormous front wheel – was dangerous, and it required athleticism to mount, and it was effectively a young man’s machine.
And the safety bicycle – two equal wheels, a chain drive to the rear one, a low frame you could simply step onto – was the invention that changed everything.
It was called the safety because that was the selling point, and the name has since been dropped because it won so completely that the alternative disappeared.
Every bicycle on earth is a safety bicycle. Nobody says so, because there is nothing left to distinguish it from.
Verdict
Superb number on a serious sample.
Staff Writer at The London Prat
