Breaking the Bounds

Breaking the Bounds

BY ELLEN GARVEY

The increasing quantity of cycling products specially designed for women--short-reach brake levers, seats, helmets, shorts, jerseys, frames with compact top tubes--is encouraging. But if you think that such products are something new, think again.

Cycling equipment created just for women has been around about as long as women have been riding bikes. But unlike the modern stuff, which is designed to improve our performance, those first products were meant to keep women's riding within bounds and deflect criticism of it. It's a fascinating and mostly unknown story.

Bicycling for women lofted onto the scene in the 1890s. Until then, bicycles were relatively dangerous high-wheel models, ridden almost exclusively by athletic young men. With the development of the "safety" bicycle (which had wheels of equal size, a chain drive, and air-filled tires), cycling became more accessible. Women, who already had abundant motives to move beyond their chaperoned and constricted lives, seized the opportunity to ride.

Women's rights advocates were ecstatic. Cycling became more than just a way to get out and about. Feminists exulted that the bicycle would force dress reform--allowing them to go uncorseted and wear divided skirts or bloomers--and believed that once women commanded such physical freedom they could surely throw off other oppressive constraints. Suffragist and temperance leader Frances Willard, who learned to ride at age 53, called her bicycle an "implement of power."

Where women saw liberation, conservatives saw a threat. They claimed that "mannish" cycling women, caricatured as strutting and smoking cigars, would ride beyond social controls and either refuse marriage or become so sexually loose that they'd be unmarriable.

Sex in the Saddle

The oddest form of assault on women's riding was an outpouring of dozens of medical articles that attacked cycling not only as likely to make women masculine but also as a threat to sexual purity. As one doctor wrote, "The saddle can be tilted in every bicycle as desired. . . . In this way a girl . . . could, by carrying the front peak or pommel high, or by relaxing the stretched leather in order to let it form a deep, hammock-like concavity which would fit itself snugly over the entire vulva and reach up in front, bring about constant friction over the clitoris and labia. This pressure would be much increased by stooping forward, and the warmth generated from vigorous exercise might further increase the feeling."

It gets stranger. To bike makers, opposition to women's cycling was an obstacle to sales. So manufacturers addressed the "problem" with a doggedly concrete and literal solution: modified seats that eliminated contact with genitals.

Ad copy for these "hygienic" seats typically warned of the "injurious" or "harmful pressure exerted by other saddles," carried medical endorsements, or declared their saddles free of "pressure against sensitive parts"--all euphemisms drawn from medical writing. (I find it somewhat ironic that modern versions of the split-seat and soft-nose designs are now targeted at men suffering from cycling-related urinary, numbness, or erection problems.)

The "stooping forward" posture that our good doctor objected to was the position adopted by "scorchers," or the fastest riders. Speed was seen as dreadfully inappropriate for women--it let them roam even farther--so speed was specifically linked to saddle masturbation. For instance, another physician complained that "the moment speed is desired the body is bent forward in a characteristic curve . . . [and] the body is thrown forward, causing the clothing to press again the clitoris, thereby eliciting and arousing feelings hitherto unknown and unrealized by the young maiden."

Scorching also meant abandoning the ideal of graceful upright riding that articles and manuals urged women to attain. Companies had to show that there was a masculine (scorching) and feminine (upright) way to ride. Adjustments to promote feminine riding were common. One cycling manual made scorching impossible for women by recommending that the handlebar be positioned 2 to 3 inches higher than the saddle for a man, but 4 to 5 inches above the saddle for a woman.

Despite these barriers, women continued pushing the boundaries of cycling. Just as they do in our era, bikes offered too much escape and independence to ignore.