When the mass-market bicycle emerged in the late 1880s, women jumped at the chance to ride. Despite its popularity, the historiography of American bicycling is quite limited. Women’s bicycling has remained understudied by scholars of women’s history, sport history, and nineteenth-century American life. This dissertation responds to these gaps by repositioning women from the margins to the center of bicycling scholarship. It argues that in the 1890s, women used bicycling as the front lines to challenge widespread gender constraints and the testing grounds to put their new political ideologies of empowerment and independence into practice. In small towns and large cities, wheelwomen used their everyday experiences as cyclists as the inspiration and authority to rewrite nineteenth-century norms of athletics, dress, harassment, medicine, work, public space and travel. They viewed recreation and activism as joint projects to embody and enact their visions for individual fulfillment and sociopolitical change, and they successfully used this consumer good to engage in the politics of everyday life in unprecedented ways. Despite powerful opponents and rampant inequalities, wheelwomen used this seemingly apolitical technology as an opportunity to answer the woman question on their own terms, sustain the Woman’s Rights Movement during a decade with few major victories, and construct new visions of modern, American womanhood well before the age of suffrage and automobiles.
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