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By that time, May had a new mount, christened “Diana.” She and her friends celebrated their purchases by having May, the group’s unofficial photographer, take Kodaks of them with their steeds.Īlthough May initially donned “an old shirt waist & skirt” to ride, she and her friends soon saw the benefit of specialized cycling attire: “short skirts” for women and knickers for men. May acquired her first “wheel,” dubbed “Isabella,” in 1893, but while she enjoyed a few “lovely” rides on her own, she confessed that she rode “so seldom” that she “got pretty tired.” This changed in 1895, when her friends began to borrow, rent, and finally purchase bicycles of their own. But it is clear from May’s diary and photographs that cycling most profoundly changed women’s lives, offering them unprecedented opportunities for physical mobility and social freedom. The cycling craze affected both men and women in May’s social circle, which included her brother Claude and his coworker John Constantine “Con” Hillman her friend Helen Elizabeth “Ned” Dutcher and her fiancé, Will Orchard sisters Alice, Emma, Mary, and Nellie MacArthur siblings Charlotte (“Chat”), Frank, Hamilton, Helen, and Katharine (“Kate”) Davis sisters Agnes, Florence, Mabel, and Mary Rogers and neighbors Mary “Matie” Hawley, Edith Joiner, and Lura Davis. But most of all, they thoroughly enjoyed the new freedoms offered by bicycles, which granted them increased mobility, offered new opportunities for outdoor recreation, and led to more spontaneous socializing in both mixed-gender and same-sex groups. In the mid-1890s, May and her friends-all middle-class, white, single professionals in their twenties and thirties-went “bicycle-crazy.” They eagerly purchased and compared bicycles, wholeheartedly adopted new fashions adapted to cycling, and enthusiastically supported new spectator sports featuring bicycles, such as races and expositions. While feminists and physicians debated the benefits of the bicycle, the diaries and photographs of one quintessential “New Woman,” May Bragdon, provide greater insight into how this social trend affected daily life.

Dickinson warned against the sensual possibilities of cycling. Anthony proclaimed that the bicycle has “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” More cautiously, gynecologist Robert L. Victorian social commentators often remarked upon the ways in which bicycles transformed women’s lives.

That same year, Bicycling for Ladies offered both practical and fashionable tips for female cyclists. “The typical girl of the present period is the bicycle girl,” announced Ladies’ World in 1896. Popular publications reinforced the association between women and cycling. Illustrator Charles Dana Gibson popularized the image of the turn-of-the-century’s liberated woman with his drawings of the “Gibson Girl,” who eagerly engaged in sports. Public discussions of cycling revolved around the “New Woman,” invariably depicted as young, white, and attractive. But above all, cycling was a quintessentially feminine pursuit indeed, the “safety” bike featured a dropped frame that accommodated women’s long skirts.Īlthough members of other groups certainly cycled, the prototypical cyclist in Victorian America was a well-to-do white woman. The high cost of bicycles in the 1890s-between $25 and $50 for a new “wheel,” the equivalent of $800 to $1600 today-was prohibitive for working-class Americans. Whatever their race or ethnicity, only well-to-do Americans could afford to take up cycling.

Although a few intrepid athletes had experimented with the “pennyfarthing” bicycle earlier, in the late 1880s, the introduction of the “safety” bike-featuring pneumatic wheels of the same size-vastly expanded the popularity of “wheeling.” By the mid-1890s, estimates of the number of US bicyclists ranged between 2 and 4 million. Thanks in part to the widespread adoption of the bicycle, the late nineteenth century represented a new era of “freedom & exhilaration” for American women, especially well-to-do white women like May Bragdon and her friends. The gorgeously bright moon & stars & the sense of freedom & exhilaration of the wheel’s motion!” “The still, dewy night-the out door odors-the white smooth ro. After dinner, the group mounted their bicycles and rode to Ontario Beach Park, arriving just at sunset for a performance of “Pinafore” at the pavilion, where they also relished “the stars & gorgeous moon & colored lights & flowers & sweet air!” Afterward, May and her companions returned home on their “wheels.” “After the first long hill it was simply inexpressibly fine,” May gushed in the pages of her diary that night.

On August 30, 1895, May Bragdon and her friends enjoyed “a perfectly delightful day” in and around Rochester, New York.

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