Human Rights
Bicycles have been one of the most important tools for people to exercise their individual rights. As ideal vehicles for creating a sense of freedom and equality, and as a way of connecting people who are empowered and mobilized by its use, bicycles have had a major impact on lifestyles, especially in the realms of women’s emancipation and class struggles.

Since the days of velocipede and high-wheelers, human-powered vehicles have offered men and women a means of moving freely through the world in a healthy way. Roads opened the landscape and expanded horizons for people of all social classes, who realized and intellectual development from bicycles.

In the late nineteenth century it was suggested that society was divided into two classes of people: those who rode bicycles and those who did not. As bicycles evolved those who first rode bicycles were more often men of the upper class -- the nobility, aristocrats, and wealthy people. For those who did not ride bicycles, it was not always by choice. As bicycles were not easily affordable or acceptable for the majority of people until the 1890s, the question was raised: "Who should ride?" Bicycles encouraged a new kind of social behavior that changed the roles and relations of men and women. The modern women's movement dates back to the 1850s and has sought equal rights and opportunities in a male dominated world. Before the 1890s, women were generally denied the right to ride bikes alone. Though they certainly rode cycling machines such as tricycles and side-saddle velocipedes, with some women participating in races and acrobatic exhibitions, there were various social restrictions that inhabited cycling for women, including chaperons, corsets, and beliefs suggesting that cycling was immoral, unfeminine, and unhealthy.

With the development of the pneumatic tire safety bicycle women discovered a vehicle for breaking away from these restrictions. Women realized the benefits of cycling for creating independence, health, comfortable fashion, and informal etiquette, and a "New Women" emerged wearing "rational" dress. Bicycles became linked with the women's movement as a powerful tool for emancipation and suffrage.

The question of women riding bicycles became a much discussed and controversial subject in the mid-1890s:

Now that the bicycle has arrived, with the new women seated in the saddle, it has suddenly become the deep concern of the prophets and seers to tell whither the wheel is carrying the women. It behooves us to settle this burning, scorching question before it has gone a century farther.

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton proclaimed some time ago that women was riding to suffrage on the bicycle. Latterly a reverend gentleman in Atlanta has consulted the oracle of his own wisdom and has proclaimed to the world that women was riding to the devil. Possibly this is the only clerical form of stating Mrs. Stanton's discovery. However that may be, Mrs. Reginald De Koven’s idea of the matter, as expressed in the August Cosmopolitan, is quite different. She is very certain that the bicycle is to be the panacea for women’s ills, physical, mental moral and imaginary. "To men, rich and poor," she says, "the bicycle is an unmixed blessing, but to women it is deliverance, revolution, salvation."

-from Wheel Talk (1895)

I can't see but that a wheel is just as good company as most husbands two years old. I would as lief talk to one inanimate object as another; and I’d rather imagine a sympathetic response in a bright and shinning handlebar than know it doesn’t exist in a frowning man, who yawns or starts when I ask him a question.

As for health, I am certain that a great many old maids will hail the advent of the bicycles as a rare substitute for the prescription so many doctors administer: "If you would only marry and have a family in this respect. You can make your wheel tidy over night, and it never kicks off its shoes the very last minute, and never smears itself with molasses. When you are ready you can start. No little elbows are stuck in your ribs; there is no wiggling; screams at the cars or at the candy stores. You glide along, silently, smoothly, swiftly. There is exhilaration and nerve tonic in the very spice of danger, the need to look sharp, the chance of adventure.

Another great superiority of the bicycle lies in the fact that you can always get rid of it when you wish. You can roll it in and stand it up ina corner, and there it stays. It will neither follow you around or insist on receiving attention at inconvenient moments. When it gets shabby or old you can dispose of it and get you a new one without shocking the entire community.

-Ann Strong, Minneapolis Tribune (1859) <4>

Such historians as record the tides of social manner and morals, have neglected the bicylce. Yet would it be difficult to deny that this "invention of the devil," as Swithin Forsyte always called it because "a penny-farthing" had startled his greys at Brighton in 1874 -- has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Carles the Second. At its bone-shaking inception innocent, because of its extraordinary discomfort, in its "penny-farthing" stage harmless, because only dangerous to the lives and limbs of the male sex, it began to be a dissolvent tof the most powerful type whten accessible to the fair in its present form. Under its incluence, wholly or in part, have wilted chaperons, long and narrow skirts,tight corsets, hair that would come down, black stockings, thick ankles, large hats, prudery and fear of the dark; under its influence, wholly or in part, have bloomed week-ends, strong nerves, strong legs, strong language, knickers, knowledge of make and shape, knowledge of woods and pastures, equality of sex, good digestion and professional occupation -- in four words, the emancipation of woman. But to Swithin, and possibly for that reason, it remained what it had been in the beginning, an invention of the devil.

-John Galsworthy, Forsyte Saga (1922) <5>

As women entered the workplace in larger numbers with better opportunities, some were employed in the shops and factoires of the bicycle industry. Beginning in the 1920s, wand especially during World War II, women dispelled the stereotype that men were more mechanically-minded by taking jobs as bicycle wheel-and frame-builders. Lucille Redmann worked as a welder and brazer at the Schwinn Bicycle Co. since the mid-30's. In the 1980s she and another woman were building top-of-the-line Paramount racing bicycles. Many women have run bike shops, and some shops in Europe and the U.S. are operated solely by and for women. In sports, the 1980s brought the first Olympic cycling events for women, and stage races such as the Tour de France Feminin.

In some societies, where sexism and cultural practices discourage women from cycling, the women's movement has greater obstacles to overcome. Karen Overton, of the the Bikes for Africa development project in Mozambique, asked the residents of Beira why so few women ride bikes. They claimed that "women don't know how...It's not ladylike for women to spread their legs...Riding isn't easy in a capulana (the traditional dress)...Women are afraid to ride... They can't be trusted because they may ride off and have affairs...The man of the house deserves to ride a bike more than the woman." While some husbandas encourage their wives to get a bike so they can ride it, the community grows more supportive when bicycles deliver more goods to market and provide for better health care and educational services.In a country where women spend up to 1,650 hours per year for basic transport and men spend only about 530 hours, the cycling women save over 330 hours per year.<6>

Lower prices for bicylcels in the 1890s allowed people of all economic classes to enhoy the adventures and exercise of cycling on the open roads. James McGurn, author of On Your Bicycle (1987), descrivbes the bicylcle's impact in realms of individual rights and class struggles, and how the ethos of wanderlust mixed with conservative authoriatarian forces in Germany. There were over 500,000 cyclists in Germany in 1890s and German Cycling Federation reperesented some 500 bicycle clubs. German cyclists had to know the various laws in each region, as many roads were off-limits for cycling, including half of all Bavarian roads. In some provinces cyclists had to ride in single file, ten meters from each other, and they were required to carry a bicycle identity pass that could be withdrawn by police officers. Furthermore, middle-class cyclists who ventured into some rural districts faced resentment and abuse. McGurn writes: "The freedom, mobility and privacy of the bicycle were more than the authorities would tolerate. Significantly, Germany was one of the first nations to provide bicycles for its policemen and local militias -- agents of social control." <7>

The Worker's Cycling Federation Solidarity (Arbeiterrafahrnbund: Solidaritat) was faounded in Germany in 1896, and 1913 it had grown to include some 150,000 members consituting a group of cooperative bicycle factories and shops, with a circulation of 167,000 for its newspaper, The Worker Cyclist. Members were described as "the Enlightened Patrols of Social Democracy, "and distributing pamphlets and political electioneering. To evade idenification they would they would throw handfuls of leaflets at crowds as they cycled past.

The idea of socialized cycling in Germany continued with the rise of National Socialism and the Nazi Party, which used the bicycle in propaganda, such as in the "Day of the German Cyclist" which took place in 1933, in bicycle parts laden with swastikas, and in Leni Riefenstahl's influential film, Olympia, which depicted blonde-haired, blue-eyed athletes. The film shows two Frenchmen and a Swiss winning medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympic road race.

As James McGurn relates, the movement traveled abroad, particularly with the Clarion Fellowship in Britain, which formed the Clarion Cycling Club. Led by Robert Blatchford and calling themselves "Clarionettes" and speaking "Clarionese," which involved shouting "boots!" and Spurs!" when passing one another on bikes, the group's hobbies and utopian ideals included cycling, literature, music, arts and crafts, rational dress, feminism, begetarianism, and farming. Blatchford wrote that "Beneficial as women's suffrage has been I should place it second to the pneumatic tyre in the general life of our working people."

Foot Notes

1. Lee Hockstader, "New Cycles in Cubas's Economy, "The Washington Post, August 19,
    1991, p.A12.
2. Joaquin Oramas, "En pocos meses, una realidad," La Habana, October 29,1990; Mimi
     Whitefield, "Facing cuts in imported oil, Cubans turn to pedal power," "The Philadelphia
     Inquirer, December, 28, 1990; George Vecsey, "Cuba Moves Forward On 2 Wheels," The
     New York Times, August 8, 1991.
3. The International Herald Tribune, May 8 1985.
4. Ann Strong, The Minneapolis Tribune, August 17, 1895, quoted in Robert A.
     Smith, A social History of the Bicycle, pg.81.
5. John Galsworthy, "four-in-hand Forsyte," On Forsyte Change. New York: Charles
     Scribner's Sons, 1930, pp. 203-204.
6. Karen Overton, "Women Take Back the Streets," Sustainable Transport, June 1994,
     pp.6-17.
7. James McGurn, On Your Bicycle, New York Facts on File,1987, p. 94.

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