Women cyclists: riding the “Wheels” of Emancipation 

 “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep on moving,” wrote Albert Einstein, who reportedly discovered the theory of relativity while on a bicycle. I take a moment to share my gratitude with him and the legion of creators who dwelled on the idea of the two wheels, perhaps with no anticipation of how the wheels would revolutionize and radically redefine the normative conventions of femininity. These “Freedom Machines,” as the American feminist Susan B Anthony would refer to the bicycles, “did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”   

Image Source: Bicycle and Feminism, Google images 

Even I felt nothing lesser than emancipated as an 8-year-old, the day I learned to ride my father’s cycle without falling. My left hand was in the perfect grip of one handle and the other holding the central barrel with my right leg crossed beneath, and my feet went on in continuous rotations negotiating with the laws of gravitation. The pleasant summer evening air blew across my face as I was chasing the devils- the friends of my budding days. They were all boys. The girls usually did not use that way of cycling for fear of falling and spoiling their faces. Some mothers even believed cycling might trigger infertility or a manly gait in their girls. Quite similar reasons for which women appeared later in the history of the “wheels” till the safety bicycles and the woman’s bicycle suit were invented, leading to a new social movement.

Cycling- a social movement? Indeed, it sounds far-fetched. Yet its impact was well narrated through the cyclomania of late nineteenth-century Europe and America when cycling moved from its previous gender-restricted precarious contraption model to a safer unisex one to ‘set the fashion to the world’ – a unique and alien idea for its time. The novel utility of the new model added a new dimension to the social attitudes of women in the form of free mobility through biking to engage as explorers and activists. Pioneering women took the bicycle culture to a revolutionary turn by shedding their restrictive corsets and voluminous skirts to “freedom dresses” of bloomers and trousers, embodying the ‘New Woman’ of the New Age who is conscious of her choices and rights. The power of the wheels was articulated powerfully in the proclamation of suffragist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1895, at the age of 80, “bicycle will inspire women with more courage, self-respect and self-reliance.”

Her words seem to resonate with this century across the globe. In developing countries like India, especially in rural areas, where gender distribution is skewed and a woman is still pursuing to claim her place as an independent individual, bicycles have catalyzed her pursuit by being a faster mode. From avoiding queues of public transport and over-dependence on another person to be carried, women working in agriculture, rural health nursing, the quarry laborers, gram sevikas, mid-day meal workers and especially the school-going girls have chosen to carry themselves. Activists in India took on cycles and cycling for the cause of reducing gender gap in education, improving school enrolment

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Source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images | via Sarah Goodyear / Grist.org

of girls and empowering them. NGOs such as Ashita no Kai s, and campaigns such as Greenpeace India’s ‘Power the Pedal’,  cycling training camps, cycle distribution schemes, Trans Himalayan Cycling Tours, have been knitting together a cycle of revolution in women’s life by riding through the barriers of ‘what will people say’!

In the timeless celebration of this engine of self-reliance, rural women in India have witnessed their independent mobility boosting their income. Such is the story of the Santhal women of Santiniketan. The best part of Santiniketan is cycling and piercing through the crisp air of the Spring. The vibrant orange and red avenue of Palash and Shimul will take you to the roads of Ghoshaldanga – home to the Santhals and other tribal communities. A sizeable number of the community’s women has taken to cycling to reach markets for selling their agricultural production and handicrafts. It is a fascinating evolution of the ‘new’ santhal woman. Amidst the vibrant shade of the trees marking the advent of Basanta mood, the contrast of vividly patterned sarees of the tribal girls and women headed to their destination riding on their wheels is indeed a novel sight! However, what catches one’s attention is how these girls and women of almost all age-e-groups are perfectly in control of the drape of five, six and even nine yards of the alluring patterned sarees while cycling. One hand holds one handle of their bicycles, while the other hand firmly grips an umbrella over the head to protect against the sun. I stand in awe as they paddle merrily with no fear of falling over. In contrast to the bloomers and pantaloons-wearing women on wheels of the west, these women are unwilling to disown the past. They are the women of modern India in their ancient garb. I rejoice in their untrammelled spirit when they are on their own ‘wheels’ of independence.   

Source: Original picture of Santhal Women. Taken in Santiniketan

The ‘wheels’ have been underestimated as a cultural agent of change. The riveting stories and travel accounts – Karl Kron’s Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle (1887), Thomas Stevens’s Around the World on a Bicycle (1887), Joseph Pennell and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s Two Pilgrim’ Progress (1887), H G Well’s Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure (1896), Mark Twain’s Taming the Bicycle (1917), have painted an adventurous and joyous image of the bicycle in public’s imagination. However, literature of the wheels narrated from a feminine perspective is rare, in fact, negligible. As quoted in Munsey’s Magazine in 1896, “To men, the bicycle, in the beginning, was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.” However, the desire to pursue their dream to ride had to stand against the test of the time, as a highly conspicuous woman on wheels was considered, if not a prostitute, a woman of low morals as “it (cycle) affords an easy means of escape from the paternal eye, and that girls seize such opportunities for impure purposes.” Cycling for the women meant jeopardizing her reputation by being an unaided target of sexist animosity, a gauntlet of jeers and insults. Unfortunately, many rural places in India are still a battleground where the challenge for the women is not learning the techniques to ride a cycle, but rather reconciling the in-congruence of what people see when a woman is on a cycle and what they believe about respectable women. In such places Cycling as a Women’s Movement  is an ongoing effort to create a feminine identity that is perfectly respectable.

  It will be a pity if history and the present remembers women only for movements like suffrage and socialism, or for their contribution to war, and not on the merit of their quieter revolution on “wheels.”

Further Reading:

1. Simpson, Clare S. 1998. A Social History of Women and Cycling In Late-Nineteenth Century New Zealand, Lincoln University

2. Marks, Patricia. 1990. Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press, University Press of Kentucky.

3. Macy, Sue. 2011. Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom, National Geographic Kids.