Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women

Author(s): Ellen Gruber Garvey

Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 66-101
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2713325
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 Reframing the Bicycle:
Advertising-Supported Magazines and
Scorching Women

ELLEN GRUBER GARVEY

Jersey City State College

Riding the wheel, our own powers are revealed to us, a new sense is
seemingly created .. . you have conquered a new world, and exultingly you
take possession of it.'

It would certainly not be desirable for a young woman to get her first ideas of
her sex from a bicycle ride.2

WHEN THE SAFETY BICYCLE IN THE I890S MADE BICYCLING ACCES-

sible to women, wheelwomen found themselves riding through con-
tested terrain. The bicycle offered new mobility: new freedoms that
both attracted feminists and other women and made it the target of
conservative attack. Both defense and attack took medicalized form:
antibicyclers claimed that riding would ruin women's sexual health by
promoting masturbation and would compromise gender definition as
well, while probicyclers asserted that bicycling would strengthen
women's bodies-and thereby make them more fit for motherhood.
Such claims are familiar from a period in which many discourses were
medicalized and issues as diverse as shoplifting and women's education
were tied to reproductive health.3 This article, however, focuses on the
unfolding of these conflicts in the world of commerce as commercial
interests negotiated with and within shifting ideas about women's
bicycle riding. Specifically, I argue that the discourse of consumption
constituted by the advertising, articles, and fiction within the develop-
ing mass-market magazine of the 1890s subsumed both feminist and

Ellen Garvey is an assistant professor of English at Jersey City State College. She is the
author of the forthcoming Reading Consumer Culture: Gender, Fiction, and Advertis-
ing in American Magazines, 1880s to 1910s.

American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (March 1995) C 1995 American Studies Association

66

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 67

conservative views in the interest of sales. In effect, these advertising-

dependent magazines asserted a version of women's bicycling that
reframed its apparent social risks as benefits.
According to advertising historians, 1890s-1910s advertising was
dominated by rational appeals, with advertisements seeking to per-
suade chiefly by attracting readers' attention and informing them that
goods were available. In this chronology, advertising argumentation
does not sprout an associational dimension until the late 1910s, when
graphics make goods "resonate with qualities desired by consumers-
status, glamour, reduction of anxiety, happy families-as the social
motivations for consumption."4 Similarly, it was not until the 1920s that
product mentions were woven into complex verbal narratives, as radio
advertisements and their characters brought far more about the social
context of consumption into the advertising strategy.5
But complicated narratives embedding products in a social context
and associating them with romance, happiness, freedom, social accept-
ance, and socially approved behavior did appear in the 1890s-in
fiction that appeared to serve no commercial purpose. We might think
of such fiction as preparing a place that advertising was later to take up;
it prefigures later strategies applied more deliberately by advertising,
while it trained readers to appreciate and respond to the kinds of
narratives that advertising later used. Product-focused stories do not
endorse individual brands but, in effect, promote product categories.
The mechanism of the advertising-dependent magazine harnessed this
ability in the interests of advertisers. In the case of one product,
bicycles, magazine fiction allayed a specific set of concerns about the
mobility of women on bicycles and reframed women's bicycling as a
trip that would end in married happiness.

Gender and Bicycles

The safety bicycle or wheel-that is, the bicycle roughly as we know

it now, with equal-sized wheels and inflated tires-was a popular
novelty in the 1890s. It opened to the middle class kinds of travel that
had previously been available only to those wealthy enough to keep a
horse, while it posed new problems and opportunities for its makers
and marketers. Its predecessor-the "ordinary" or high-wheel bicycle,
with an enormous wheel in front driven directly by the pedals at its axle
and a single small wheel in back-was dangerous and difficult to ride.

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68 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Notoriously, a bump in the road could send the rider over the
handlebars. It was impossible to ride in skirts or even divided skirts,
and riding it was specifically marked as a masculine pursuit.6 Riders
were a relatively small group of athletic young men.7
The high wheeler was put to use in already established fictional
formulas about the man in the world and the woman at home. One such
general formula appeared frequently in 1880s Godey's Lady's Book
stories. -In it, a man is knocked out or temporarily disabled to become a
suitable husband. His injury obliges him to stay in one place while he
sees how well some woman takes care of him ("You have been ill-
very ill.... The doctor says you are not to lift your head for several
days"8) and has a chance to fall in love with her. This formula enables
courtship in a world in which women live circumscribed lives, their
accomplishments largely invisible, while men are mobile. Retrieved
from the highways and deposited in a woman's household, a man is
kept still long enough to notice the tender womanly and housewifely
arts she has cultivated.9
The high-wheel bicycle is appended to this formula as a handy
emblem of male mobility in an 1888 Godey's Lady's Book story, Max
Vander Weyde's "A Turn of the Wheel." In it, a high wheeler both
represents and enables a man's mobility by opening worlds into which
he would not otherwise be admitted. Here, a young American wheeling
through Provence is so distracted by the sight of an immobile young
woman who stands in a doorway and has "the unconscious trick of
posing like a bisque statuette" that he takes a header over his
handlebars and must be brought in and nursed, though Americans are
forbidden in this household. (The statuette's father disappeared fightin
on the Union side in the Civil War.) Even the high-wheel bicycle's
drawback, its liability to throw riders over the handlebars, becomes a
useful feature: the rider falls off the bicycle into a household where he
falls in love. Later, evicted by her angry uncle, the American rides off
to Paris and locates his love's long-lost father, whose permission
enables the couple to marry. The man must be knocked off of his high
wheeler to bring him within women's sphere and make him marriage-
able: he would go by too fast otherwise.
As long as such a man was on a high wheeler, he was definitively
outside women's sphere. The safety bicycle's accessibility to both men
and women, however, raised new social issues. Since riding a safety
offered an enhanced version of the freedoms that riding a high wheeler

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 69

had allowed men, the act of riding, as well as the safety bicycle itself,
was seen as essentially masculine. Women's riding therefore posed a
threat to gender definition. It threatened women's sexual purity as well,
as will be discussed below. And, when unmarried men and women rode
together, cycling threatened chastity and order.
Manufacturers wished to sell bicycles to as many people-both men
and women-as possible. Assurance that riding the new safety was
appropriate to their gender could be important to female potential
buyers and could allay either their own concerns or those of others who
might object to their riding. So, since the safety, though apparently
nongendered, was understood to be masculine, women's riding had to
be made socially acceptable to sell safety bicycles to a larger market.
Manufacturers pursued a variety of strategies for gendering the
safety bicycle-that is, asserting that a women's mode of riding was
available and that riding need not be masculinizing. They quickly
differentiated models of bicycles for men and women: the diamond-
shaped frame (similar in shape to present-day men's bicycles) was
presented as standard; the drop frame that allows riding in a skirt be-
came the marked category, the women's version. (Because the diamond
frame is structurally stronger, women's models were often ten pounds
heavier than men's.) The notion that bicycles should be gendered soon
extended beyond accommodating dresses. An 1895 advertisement for
Columbia bicycles shows special diamond-frame women's bicycles for
women who plan to ride in "zouave [bloomer] or knickerbocker
costume." Although it appears no different in size or shape from the
men's bicycles, the manufacturer gave it a distinctive name and sells it
as a woman's bicycle. The form of the advertisement-a paper doll-
itself asserts the gender appropriateness of women's riding and reformu-
lates questions of appropriate dress as questions of style and fashion.1
Manufacturers assigned separate model names to emphasize the
genderedness of the bicycles: the ambassadorial Envoy for men and
birdlike Fleetwing for women and the Napoleon and Josephine, for
example.11

Advertising the Bicycle

Other forms of advertising linked bicycles with codes of femininity.

Bicycle manufacturers were, according to one advertising historian,
"trail-blazing pioneer[s]" in magazine advertisements in their use of

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70 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

extensive space.'2 Designed by artists such as Maxfield Parrish and Will

Bradley, the visual elements of the graphically sophisticated bicycle
advertisements invested bicycles with glamour and the graphic associa-
tions of being up-to-date. Art nouveau's flowing curvilinear organic
forms linked bicycles with the natural world and echoed themes of
numerous magazine articles of the period in which bicycles provide
city dwellers with easy touristic access to a countryside appreciated as
scenic and picturesque. Although articles on bicycling into the country-
side typically discuss the technicalities of the tourists' arrangements
and issues of bicycle repair, traveling by bicycle is nonetheless framed
as a "natural" experience, freeing the urbanite from such "mechanical"
constraints as railroad schedules."3 Bicycles within the advertising
posters and magazine advertisements become design elements them-
selves, and the viewer is invited to become part of a harmonious or
exotic picture by buying and riding the bicycle (Fig. 1). In these
advertisements, as in the articles, the bicycle is imagined not as another
machine in the garden but as part of the garden.
While cartoons in humor magazines such as Life and Punch satirized
women bicyclists as mannishly dressed menaces and a few bicycle and
accessory manufacturers' advertisements displayed very young women
riding in daringly short skirts, the more naturalistic of the drawings in
advertisements and catalogs provide constant visual reassurance that
women could ride the bicycle with grace and even modesty."4 In what
amounts to a convention, such advertising art frequently shows women
riding in skirts that cover their feet as they ride and appear as if they
would drag on the ground if the figure in the drawing stood (Fig. 2).
Both the naturalistic drawings and the stylized art nouveau productions
demonstrate that bicycling women could be both decorative and
decorous. The Victor advertisement in Figure 1, for example, highlights
the curves of the drop frame on the middle bicycle and uses the netting
of the rear-wheel dress guard on the furthest bicycle as an ornamental
embellishment while emphasizing the three women riders themselves
as flowing decorative elements.
The advertisements thus visually proclaim a suitable women's mode
for riding on a suitably differentiated bicycle. The written copy of
1890s bicycle advertisements was less sophisticated than the graphics.
Aside from fanciful and suggestive model names, such copy often re-
stricts itself to simple declarations about price and speed as it advances
information and pseudoinformation. But, like other advertisement copy

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 71

SAI CU-- .SWT

Figure 1. This 1895 adve

appeared in many magaz

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72 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

of the period, bicycle advertising copy rarely embeds the product in a

social scenario or suggests the social consequences following use of the
product. That was to be left to magazine fiction.

The Threat of the Mobile Woman

For women in particular, the new mobility the bicycle allowed

offered freer movement in new spheres, outside the family and home-
heady new freedoms that feminists celebrated. Suffragist and temper-
ance leader Frances Willard called her bicycle an "implement of
power" and "rejoiced ... in perceiving the impetus that this uncompro-
mising but fascinating and illimitably capable machine would give to
that blessed 'woman question.""5 Maria E. Ward's 1896 manual
Bicycling for Ladies hints at a connection between cycling and suffrage
by linking riding to both autonomy and responsible citizenship:

Riding the wheel, our own powers are revealed to us .... You have
conquered a new world, and exultingly you take possession of it.... You feel
at once the keenest sense of responsibility.... You become alert, active,
quick-sighted, and keenly alive as well to the rights of others as to what is
due yourself.... To the many who wish to be actively at work in the world,
the opportunity has come.16

The "New Woman on a bicycle ... exercised power .. . changing the

conventions of courtship and chaperonage, of marriage and travel,"
Patricia Marks notes in her survey of the period.17 In fact to some, the
bicycle in itself seemed to offer a transcendent solution to women's
problems. As playwright Marguerite Merington wrote in "Woman and
the Bicycle," an 1895 Scribner's article: "Now and again a complaint
arises of the narrowness of woman's sphere. For such disorder of the
soul the sufferer can do no better than to flatten her sphere to a circle,
mount it, and take to the road."1I8 Similarly, for Willard, the bicycle was
a means of access to a larger world, or was even that world itself: "I
began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the
world, upon whose spinning wheel we must all learn to ride." She
explains in her memoir of learning to ride that she took up bicycling at
age fifty-three in part so her example would "help women to a wider
world."19
Conservatives attacked women's bicycling in correspondingly hyper-
bolic terms, as a force that would disrupt social roles by allowing
women freedom of movement beyond family surveillance and outside

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 TERRESTRZAL FLIGHT

'4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1

WITH THE BIRDS AND SQUIRRELS.

"CREAT, SIR-DISTINCTLY CREAT."

THE

i X~' AMERICAN RAMBLER i

* ~~~BICYCLES. ,,
if BEST AND MOST LUXURIOUS. ' |

CATALOGUE ON APPLICAT10N. 6

CORMULLY & JEFFERY!

7 : <~~ MFG. CO. 1>
NEW YORK. BOSTON. CHICACO. WASHINCTON.

Figure 2. Drawings in advertising material often showed women riding in

improbably long skirts. (Cosmopolitan, Nov. 1890; Sept. 1891.)

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74 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

traditional gender roles. Like other attacks on women's opportunities

for autonomy in this period, this one took sexual form. One way
conservative fear of the disruptive potential of women's riding was
articulated was through medical discourse that attacked bicycling as
both masculinizing and a threat to sexual purity. Probicycling forces
also used medical discourse to endorse women's riding.
The two sides of this medical discussion, those favoring and those
opposing women's bicycling, had in common the notion that medical
pronouncement on women's bicycling was necessary and called for-
that pleasurable physical activity undertaken by women should come
under medical authority. Nearly every book on bicycling from the
period includes a discussion, citing medical authorities, of bicycling's
effects on women's health. Special magazine issues on bicycling
routinely include articles from physicians commenting on riding and
women's health. Even Frances Willard follows this convention and
interrupts her discussion of her own riding experiences to address what
she believes to be an issue worrying the reader: "And now comes the
question 'What do the doctors say?' Here follow several testimonials."
The testimonials she chose unsurprisingly favor women's riding; their
inclusion at all, however, demonstrates how pervasive was the assump-
tion that medical sanction for or against women's riding was appropri-
ate and even necessary.20
As we will see, both sides of the specifically medical discussion have
in common an interest in keeping women within traditional roles. One
line of antibicycling medical discourse classed women's riding with
other athletic activity as entailing objectionable amounts of exertion.
Riding was a threat to gender roles; while it would be safe for healthy
men to do so, it would be dangerous for women to expend so much of
their strength on physical activity. The other line of the argument
against women's cycling framed its objections in terms of sexual
health. Critics cloaked their concern in discussion of supposed prob-
lematic effects of bicycle saddles: as a result of the angle of the saddle,
"[t]he bicycle teaches masturbation in women and girls."21
The whole question of riding astride anything was problematic for
women to begin with. Discussing children's toys, Karin Calvert points
out that "one of the cardinal rules of child-rearing in the nineteenth-
century ... forbade girls to straddle any object. Girls were prohibited
from riding hobby horses, stick horses, bicycles, velocipedes, even
seesaws, and a true lady learned to ride real horses side saddle. The

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 75

position, parents believed, threatened the sexual innocence of their

young daughters." The prohibition against girls using toys with straddle
seats was part of the larger picture of rigidly separated spheres of play
for girls and boys. "Playing the wrong game or with the wrong toys
could prematurely awaken sexual feelings in children and destroy their
natural purity," Calvert notes. In other words, such play was a form of
deviance that threatened both sexual innocence and gender definition.
Not surprisingly, one physician calls riding astride "too mannish to be
proper for a woman."22
And yet, with the advent of the safety bicycle and its female
ridership, straddling could no longer be avoided, and attention focused
on details of its troubling implications. In an outpouring of numerous
articles in medical journals, physicians went into extensive and virtu-
ally prurient detail about ways the bicycle saddle might produce sexual
stimulation:

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.

This physician reported the case of an "overwrought, emaciated girl of

fifteen whose saddle was arranged so that the front pommel rode
upward at an angle of about 35 degrees, who stooped forward
noticeably in riding, and whose actions ... strongly suggested ... the
indulgence of masturbation."23 Although the patient is evidently worn
to a frazzle by her fevered indulgence, the imagery of this physician's
first passage seems to reflect concern that female masturbation is a kind
of indolence or relinquishment of vigilance: the leather is "relaxed";
the vulva rests in that signal article of Victorian leisure furniture, a
hammock. The tell-tale riding stoop of the second passage, however,
raises a different issue: the "scorching" position-that is, the bent-over-
the-handlebars posture adopted by speeders. In male riders, it might be
criticized or mocked. But for women, fast riding was condemned;
deviations from upright decorousness and graceful riding are more
serious, and bicycle-riding posture could be a significant measure of
propriety and sexual innocence.
Another physician complained that "except when one rides slowly

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76 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

and erect" the "whole body's weight ... rests on the an

saddle." Here, not only the saddle and its adjustment b
at fault, and the punishment for stepping out of line is pain and
pathology:

The moment speed is desired the body is bent forward in a characteristic

curve and the body's weight is transmitted to the narrow anterior half of the
saddle, with all the weight pressing on the perineal region.... If a saddle is
properly adjusted for slow riding and in an unusual effort at speed or hill
climbing, the body is thrown forward, causing the clothing to press against
the clitoris, thereby eliciting and arousing feelings hitherto unknown and
unrealized by the young maiden

and painful and debilitating "granular erosion" or "polypoid growth"

will result.24
Just as Sherlock Holmes's keen eye in the 1903 story "The Adven-
ture of the Solitary Cyclist" can read the bicycling of his client Miss
Violet Smith from "the slight roughening of the side of the sole caused
by the friction of the edge of the pedal,"25 an educated eye might detect
wantonness in any deviation by a woman cyclist from an upright
posture. Similarly, medical books had warned for years that the signs
that girls "are addicted to such a vice . . . [are] only too plain to the
physician"26 and that the "habit" of masturbation left "its mark upon the
face so that those who are wise may know what the girl is doing."27
Thus, while bicycle advertisements might show men in a variety of
riding positions, women are shown only seated upright, as in Figure 3.
Moreover, perhaps in line with medical books' concern that telling girls
of such a vice would be in itself "dangerous" but should be unnecessary
if other instructions were given properly,28 guides for women cyclists
do not mention masturbation but stress the importance of sitting
upright. Even bicycle enthusiasts Adelia and Lina Beard dwell on the
decorous upright posture: "our eyes rest with delight upon the trimly
clad, graceful rider who, sitting erect, seems almost to stand on her
pedals as she moves along."29 Manufacturers drew on this concern
about posture verbally as well as in advertising graphics; Rambler's
catalog proclaims the handlebars of its woman's model "so bent as to
admit of an erect and graceful position, the secret of the well known
fact that ladies when riding Ramblers present a more pleasing and
attractive appearance than on any other machine."30 Riding posture
could be enforced, too, by the alignment of the bicycle; setting the
handlebars several inches higher for women than men, in accordance

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 77

of REMINGTON BICYCLES enthusiastically praise these famous wheels.

ALL RIDERS Many new features for '96 described in Catalogue, free.
REMINGTON ARMS CO., 313-315 BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY.
BRANCHES:
New York, 59th St. and Grand Circle; Brookly-n- 533 Fulton St.; Boston, i62 Columbus Ave.; San Francisco. 418-42

Figure 3. This Remington advertisement displays the greater range of riding

postures-including the scorching position of the second man from the left-
allowed men. With the exception of a few advertisements in which women are
shown coasting with their feet up, women are almost invariably depicted in the
upright posture shown here. (Harper's Weekly, 13 June 1896.)

with instructions in one manual, prevented women from "scorching"

(Fig. 3).31
The ultimate effect the rather appealing descriptions of bicycle
saddles had on women's interest in riding is not clear. As we have
already seen, however, women were an important market for the
bicycle manufacturers that had sprung up in great numbers during thi
period, and opposition to their riding was an obstacle to sales. While
the bicycle saddle may not strike us as an ideal sex toy, manufacturers
took the medical discussion about women's bicycle saddles and
masturbation literally and addressed it with a doggedly concrete and
literal solution of yet another product: a modified saddle that eliminated
the point of contact with genitals. Figure 4 shows advertisements for
several crotchless cycle seats intended to circumvent possible saddle
masturbation. Advertising copy for these seats typically warns of
"injurious" or "harmful pressure exerted by other saddles" or declares
their saddles "free of pressure against sensitive parts."32 One advertise-
ment delicately explains, for example, that it "is especially desirable for
ladies, for it holds the rider like a chair, the entire weight being
supported by the bones of the pelvis, which alone touch the saddle."3
The connection between the euphemistic phrases and medical discus-
sion of women's masturbation is clear from the medical articles from
which some of the endorsements are drawn.

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78 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Of course the manufacturers' solution does not get at what

at issue: women's mobility and independence. The medicalized
bation metaphor was a particularly compelling one because both the
bicycling woman and the masturbating woman were out of male
control and possibly doing damage to "the race." They were exciting
new desires in themselves that would seem, following the fallen-
women logic of downward trajectory, to roll them inevitably down the
garden path as they explore their own new territory, their own new-
found land; both were going off on their own, in solitary vice or
potentially solitary recreation. Conservatives feared that "masculin-
ized" bicycling women would move out of traditional roles in other
respects, make marriages outside of parental supervision, and ride
beyond the family and its control-issues soon to arise again in relation
to the automobile. Certainly, as Merington's and Willard's celebrations
of the bicycle as an escape from women's constricted sphere demon-
strate, the possibility of doing so was part of the attraction bicycling
held for women. The issues metaphorized in the medical attacks on
bicycle masturbation are obviously too deep and complex to be
addressed by changing the bicycle saddle.

Benefiting the Race

No woman should ride a bicycle without first consulting her medical man.34

Antibicycling medical arguments were, by and large, restricted to the

medical press and did not appear in the advertising-dependent general
magazines; probicycling medical arguments appeared in both. The
probicycling medical discourse was less likely to counter complaints
about the saddle directly than to propose that bicycling might improve
women's health by getting them into the fresh air. "Moderation,"
however, was crucial, and the physician was proposed as a key figure,
monitoring and regulating the doses of riding, especially in anecdotes
of women invalids helped by bicycling. One cycling book, for example,
after cautioning that any woman in less than perfect health should
consult her physician before taking up cycling, reports the success of
physician-supervised cycling for a semi-invalid. For this insomniac
musician, a physician prescribed a series of cures: "it got to such a pass
that the doctor stopped her music, shut up the piano, and forbade any
hearing of music. This did no good. They then sent her to the

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 79

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T"mt. a& hard or as -it as eachl rider desires. - theist sga
er any change of shape, and the unsteadiness of similari
>addles is entirel dispelled. It prevents seetine. ehafng. ODEL
end *11 d;scomftot. and is eteectalii desirable for ladies. fir
ii holds Ihe rider lit ke chair. the entire weight twne ub
ported h- t he bones of the pel-is. which alone touch the ^ddlL Mem *gm erne bee
Prie. AP.-Retlrnaeit it seetn da-s. if unistesactorty. e1tm11,1ite t we *. MOST
P r~~~~~~~~~~~~~neomeed~ be tlb el b POST.
TWE SAGER MFC. COMPANY, - Roctlestcr, Nf. Y. ileae.
fmSfWecrort of fe eefehrsti'd Sir 'Seddcel. Onrsey Child' seee. ced d6e' Bewi' sperwi/ies.

_ .~~~~~~ ~EASY.

YrOU FOR LA.DIFS

M YOU nnNK\.. tomount because t
that although your sa dle low and easy to sit u
was uncomfortable zt first, vou , CBAX it iS wide and flat
have gotten useJ to It now and it is there- / tiback, but short
fore not injuring you, t r c ,naIrow in front.
7~~~4 ~but the Injurioiis Pres-
ure is there ju~f tue Al Injurious pressure
siine Our s.udIrt tle|' absolutely avoided.
soluteis noil-injurlius. W 111

.iMESINGER
_ ilbr Bet.~ &Co.
at~~is _ $2.50._
_"uee 8ro;^-4i co-c | _ Hulbert Bros.B s. CO.
_A West 331 St I el3a1..tic lficleti.
Ne_ -'Y _rk 26 e t .23. _
NeW Y oC'.

Figure 4. Advertisements for crotchless and modified bicycle seats developed in

response to concerns about women riding astride. (Ladies Home Journal, April
1896.)

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80 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

mountains; this failed. The doctor prescribed a bicycle, but her mother
would not consent, thinking something ought to be found less objec-
tionable and just as powerful." When the doctor's variants of S. Weir
Mitchell's famous rest cure fail, the doctor insists on the bicycle and
threatens to drop the case otherwise; the mother, here in the classic
female role of conservatively resisting male modem science, agrees.
The doctor's progressive insistence on the bicycle produces a cure and
a grateful family.35 Advertisers, too, tap this discourse in copy that
assures readers that "bicycling is a boon . . . especially to ailing
women" and in copy that explicitly proposes the bicycle as a medical
prescription (Fig. 5).36
More crucially, the medically approved version of women's athleticism
was not only supervised but was often harnessed to a socially approved
purpose: bicycling was commonly said to restore to health women
whose invalidism and malingering made them unfit not only for
musicianship but for motherhood; it did so, in part, by strengthening
the uterus.37 Frances Willard, for example, exults that "the physical
development of humanity's mother-half would be wonderfully ad-
vanced by that universal introduction of the bicycle." Advertisers
asserted a direct link between motherhood and riding in advertisements
such as Columbia's in Figure 6.38
Redemption from invalidism into motherhood was a particular
concern in a period of anxiety that white, nonimmigrant middle-class
women were having too few babies. Given the high mid-1890s bicycle
prices, these women constituted the female bicycle market. Proponents
of women's riding drew on this argument, too, to further support their
advocacy. As Marguerite Merington put it, bicycling is "a pursuit that
adds joy and vigor to the dowry of the race."39 The word race here is
used as it often appears in the eugenics discourse of this period, where
it ambiguously means both human and white native-born "race."40 The
Pope Company's name for its bicycles-Columbia, the United States's
allegorical identity-and other companies' use of such names as the
United States, the Patriot, the Charter Oak, the Eagle, and the Liberty
("America's Representative Bicycle"), already positioned bicycling as a
particularly American, even patriotic, pursuit and made clear which
group's fecundity would increase through riding-moderate riding.
Other manufacturers associated their bicycles with England, the source
of what were seen as "real" Americans, and named their bicycles
Imperial, Waverly, Worcester, Windsor, Warwick, Raleigh, Royal, and
Richmond.4'

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 An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
U. Medical statistics show that on the
average only one woman in a thousand is 6best
with perfect health. Is your wife an invalid?
~~ ~ .~ Are you constantly paying doctor's bills?

Shtev.E

Flat: ..1{feIy Bsoyee Ne. 1.

$4. e ra. "t"81 if f tee . f*.lip-- /r
Phy cl~aw wheho will use tars prpscrtpao eii have n o Gd
occaao to reort to Koch's lymph. cod.-lier otl. etc. . -
Do. C. E. RICHARDS.

The judicious use of a bicycle by a lady will work wonders in the

improvement of her health.. In constructing our

| COLUMBIA LADIES' SAFETY

wve have aimed to make it light, strong, and easy riding. The
many testimonials we have received are the best evidence that. we
have succeeded in making a wheel. perfectly satisfactory.

IT IS FITTED W[T14

Cushion or Pneumatie Tires.

The pneumatic tire absorbs vibration and makes riding on any surface
pleasant and agreeable. The handle-bar allows the rider to assume a
natural and graceful position.
This machine and the pneumatic tire are fully warranted.
Apply for a Catalogue at the nearest Columubia Agcn--v or it will be sent by masil for two 2.cent stitmps.

POPE MFC, CO.,

221 Columbus Ave., Boston.
12 WARREN STRECT 2*1 WABASH AVEN4UE, FACTORY,
NIW YORK, M. Y. CHICAGO. HARTFORO, CONNS
Whe. soe wont. pima. meouom The Cooooia.eie..

Figure 5. This Columbia advertisement emphasizes the health benefits available to

women through bicycling. (Cosmopolitan, Nov. 1891.)

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82 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

The Changing Magazine

Women's bicycling raised deeper and more complex fears than

changing the bicycle saddle or proposing probicycling health argu-
ments could counter. Strategies used by individual advertisers to
demonstrate visually women's graceful, feminine riding were also
insufficient counterweights. Instead, the threat bicycling seemed to
pose was defused through another novelty of the 1890s, the advertis-
ing-dependent magazines addressed to middle-class readers. In this
period, publishers of middle-class magazines stopped relying for
profits on magazine sales and subscriptions and, by lowering their
cover prices and increasing their circulations and advertising rates,
began to rely on sales of advertising space. In other words, publishers
shifted their transaction from the sale of a magazine to readers to the
sale of readers to advertisers.42 Other changes accompanied the birth of
the mass-circulation, ten-cent magazines such as Munsey's, McClure's,
and Cosmopolitan; even magazines that kept their prices at twenty-five
or thirty-five cents, such as Harper's and Scribner's, were touched by
the greater interest advertisers took in magazines.
The ascendent editors of the ten-cent magazines of this period, as
Christopher Wilson has noted, no longer waited in genteel fashion for
stories to drop in over the transom but actively solicited and commis-
sioned topical, timely material.43 Stories involving the new fad of
bicycling appear frequently; many of them are in special bicycling
issues. Tying magazine content to a fad lured advertisers; these special
issues were filled both with bicycling stories and articles and with
advertisements for bicycles, tires, cycling clothes, and of course
saddles to such an extent that bicycle advertisements constituted 10
percent of national advertising in the 1 890s.44 Not only were magazines
an attractive new advertising medium for a new product, but magazines
and bicycles also shared other intimate connections, suggestive of the
sympathy the new magazine publishers felt for the kinds of businesses
likely to invest in advertising. Publisher S. S. McClure began his
editorial career working for the Pope Manufacturing Company as the
editor of The Wheelman (later renamed Outing). In turn, McClure's
magazine showed unusual helpfulness to Pope. In 1897, McClure's ran
a four-part series, under the heading "Great Business Enterprises: The
Marvels of Bicycle Making," in which a McClure's writer tours
factories of the Pope Manufacturing Company and reports in great

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 83

Figure 6. In line with concerns about linking physical fitness with reproduction,
this Columbia advertisement links maternity and the bicycle. (Ladies' Home
Journal, Aug. 1896.)

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84 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

detail the care taken in all phases of the bicycle-making process. The
layout is identical to that of other editorial matter in the magazine; only
a headnote at the beginning of the first piece in the series and a small
footnote at the end of the other pieces tells the reader that these
glimpses "behind the scenes .. . [of] an advertisement" are paid for by
Pope.45
Though, as in this example, they might partially blur it, even the ten-
cent magazines maintained a spatial distinction between editorial and
advertising material-or, as Richard Terdiman puts it, between articles
(news and opinion) and "articles" (advertising).46 And yet publishers
and editors of the new magazines shared with their advertisers a
common interest in the up-to-date world of commerce and industry and
its new products-in this case, the bicycle.47 The monthly magazine's
stake in timeliness pressed toward the discussion and incorporation of
the new advertised products in articles and stories. Doing what
advertisers could not do for themselves, magazines acted for advertis-
ers in the aggregate. Their alignment and connections with industry
encouraged favorable reflections on those products.
Because the fears women's bicycling raised were social, fiction, with
its articulation of social relationships, was better adapted than medical
or other articles to taking the sting out of those fears by fictionally
reconfiguring the relationships the bicycle seemed to be changing and
by assigning new meanings to those changes. Fiction carried the burden
of instructing the readers in the complexities of the bicycle's social
meaning, investing it with romance and glamour, and reassuring
readers that riding would not disrupt social order. Like the realist fiction
in which Amy Kaplan finds a "strategy for imagining and managing the
threats of social change,"48 the formulaic stories examined here reas-
sured readers that women on bicycles did not, in fact, threaten either the
stability of the family or of just parental authority.
Bicycling did promote new forms of heterosexual sociability that
modified the forms of parental authority. One commentator at the time
heralded the "new social laws" the bicycle was bringing into being:
"Parents who will not allow their daughters to accompany young men
to the theatre without chaperonage allow them to go bicycle-riding
alone with young men. This is considered perfectly proper. It seems to
be one phase of the good comradeship which is so strong a feature of
the pastime." Although this commentator's assertion that "every rider
feels at liberty to accost or converse with every other rider" might be

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 85

read as a threatening aspect of bicycle mobility, he points to the bicycle

itself as enforcing "the uniformly quiet, orderly, and decorous conduct
of the great army of wheelmen."49 While formal introductions were
usually considered a necessity in the genteel and gentility-aspiring
classes, meeting on bicycles seems to have overridden that require-
ment-perhaps because, at least through the mid-I 890s, riders could be
assumed to be middle class. The bicycle functions almost as another
character: a mutual acquaintance who legitimately makes the introduc-
tion. While one etiquette book suggests mounting a chaperone on a
bicycle, this appears to have been rare both in practice and in the
stories.50 The stories instead assert that the new, seemingly less-
controlled forms of heterosexual sociability enabled by the bicycle will
produce at least as satisfactory a result as traditional courtship-and
that the satisfactory result may even be caused by the bicycle.

Bicycling Formulas

Stories that incorporated bicycles within a courtship plot (and

courtship stories were themselves ubiquitous in middle-class maga-
zines) use formulas that defuse the threat of women's bicycling.
Bicycling in courtship stories frequently allows middle-class young
people to meet; usually they turn out to share not only social class but
also social connections and to be entirely suitable matches. In one such
story, "Rosalind Awheel," by Flora Lincoln Comstock, in Godey's
Magazine's 1896 special bicycling issue, a girl resists her father's
disapproval of bicycling.52 The story addresses and defuses the possi-
bility that bicycling might be masculinizing. Although Ethel dresses as
a boy to escape home on her bicycle tour, she is spotted by a fellow
bicyclist, a socially suitable brother of a girlfriend. Revealing that he
has long been interested in her, he insists on seeing her home "safe
under [her] father's roof." This story ultimately recaptures Ethel but
allows a reader to briefly enjoy with Ethel the pleasures of transgres-
sion without permanent consequences. It closes with Ethel safely back
in girl's clothes and her courtship with the right sort of fellow well
underway.53
In another formulaic story, the desire for a bicycle enables romance
and substitutes for longings toward more troublesome sorts of mobility.
In the 1896 Munsey's magazine courtship story "The Story of a Story,"
by Adelaide L. Rouse, Elizabeth tries to sell a story to a magazine to

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86 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

earn money for a bicycle.54 The magazine's editor and assistant editor
mock the young woman's story to one another and reject it, but the
assistant editor begins courting her under the guise of teaching her to
write, though he believes her incapable of it. The desire for either the
freedom of the bicycle or the power of writing and earning money are
here both subsumed into romance, and the story ends with the assistant
editor's announcement to the editor that they are buying a tandem
bicycle-here both a sign of betrothal in an attractively companionable
marriage and a mobility specifically restricted for the woman to move-
ment as a pair (the assistant editor already has his own bicycle). The
bicycle story thus keeps an advertised item in the reader's eye while
demonstrating the bicycle's multiple uses and containing the threat
posed by woman's mobility-both literal and economic. And clearly,
this young woman will not be riding off alone or, for that matter,
making suspicious adjustments to her saddle. That threat has been
undercut by watchful editorial control: both Munsey's magazine's and
the betrothed editor's.
The editors complain that Elizabeth's stories are "prose idyl[s]," set
in the vague realm of romance, full of such sentences as, "The sun was
shedding his last rays upon a lowly cot, embowered by trees, behind
which flowed a rivulet."55 Unlike such work, Rouse's own story is in
line with the tenets of realism that the two editors espouse in their con-
versation; it is full of the tangible life of the world. Its characters are un-
derstood through their relationship not only to one another but also to
commodities such as typewriters and bicycles. These signal our pres-
ence in an up-to-date world that is definitively different from life with
lowly cots and rivulets. One result of this brand of realism, with its de-
ployment of props, is that objects in the story are not only in the same
two-dimensional space, printed on the same paper as the magazine's
advertisements, but are in the same register as well; they are familiar
from the ordinary middle-class world of commerce. And yet Rouse's
story, with its neatly tied courtship plot, is realism only in contrast to
the romantic excesses of Elizabeth's writing. It depends both on this
counter-example and on its assertion of commonality with the objects
and advertising narratives in the magazine to claim and even insist on
that status.
The events of Rouse's story are precipitated by a character's desire to
buy a bicycle. The reader is invited to participate in the story's world of

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 87

interested consumers. At the same time, through their presence in

stories, the objects in the advertisements are endowed with a larger
social meaning and acquire significance or have it reinforced, including
an association to courtship rather than to solitary, independent mobility.
The bicycle links the two characters socially and mechanically. Eliza-
beth and her editor's mutual enjoyment of it points them toward new
models of family life in which, according to one commentator, "whole
families ride together, carrying with them wherever they go the spirit of
the family circle." Because "husband and wife are able to enjoy this
together, the result is a new bond of union."56 The bicycle thus
facilitates new expectations of heterosexual sociability in courtship and
marriage, a version of middle-class marriage in which a failed writer is
a suitable helpmate to a rising editor.
Rouse's story hints at endorsement of a new form of marriage in
which the husband is less the absolute patriarch than the senior partner,
still superior in knowledge and authority. Old-line patriarchal authority
appears in other of these stories in the form of the father. When his
authority is seemingly undercut by the daughter's bicycling, the
daughter is shown to actually achieve a higher form of obedience to it.
In one story, for example, an ailing young woman obeys the "prescrip-
tion" of her brother, the doctor; defies her father, the minister; and takes
up cycling. She gains renewed strength to apply to her father's
housework.57
Similarly, Harry St. Maur's 1897 "To Hymen on a Wheel" (the title
alludes to the Greek god of marriage, not anatomy) emphasizes the old-
fashioned unreasonableness of parental demands through its setting in
a "wee village" in England, whose most "metropolitan" inhabitant is
the postman who delivers mail on his bicycle. An obstinate, dialect-
speaking father opposes his modem seventeen-year-old daughter Jenny's
desire to marry Will; although he likes Will, the father wants her to wait
until she is thirty, her parents' age at marriage. The father secretly reads
Will's letter telling Jenny to meet him at noon to marry and then thwarts
her efforts to get to town alone. When she invents an errand, he follows
her to Tim the postman's house. Pointing out his bicycle, she says

"Have you heard, father, as how girls ride them things?" indicating Tim's
bike-"in trousers and breeches like men."
"The brazen things. No gal o' mine shall ever ride one in any kind o' way.
It aint commonly decent."

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88 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Jenny gets on it, of course, and rides off to the registrar's,

the road peddling in great shape." In a moment we were not told about,
though it seems to have had something to do with a group of American
tourists awheel who stayed at her father's inn, Jenny had learned to
ride.58
Here, the bicycle does undermine parental authority. But we are
carefully told how unreasonable that authority is and that Jenny is
obeying her father in almost every way-he approves of her choice of
Will and even insists that her eventual marriage should be at the
registrar's office. The father's opposition to women's bicycle riding
becomes his final old-fashioned absurdity and affirms the righteousness
of the daughter's move. Bicycling's liberating power is paired with an
unambiguous situation. And-in an American magazine filled with
advertisements for Columbia, Liberty, and United States bicycles-the
cause of bicycling is positioned as a blow for American speed against
old-world sluggishness.
The formula we saw earlier in the Godey's Lady's Book story "A
Turn of the Wheel," in which the high-wheel rider is knocked from t
world of male mobility in order to enter the female home and fall in
love, is retooled for the safety bicycle in an 1893 story in the bicycling
and outdoors magazine Outing. In John Seymour Wood's "A Danger-
ous Sidepath: A Story of the Wheel," Sam, a young, overworked
lawyer, takes up riding after his doctor tells him he is "in danger of
consumption." The story interrupts itself for a self-conscious testimo-
nial: "today he is sound as a new dollar, his eye bright, his lungs
healthy. But how this sounds like some medical 'ad' !".9 It is not an
advertisement, the narrator explains, since he does not promote a
particular model. He goes on to tell Sam's courtship story.
On a week-long bicycle trip with two male friends, Sam rides on a
small town's smooth sidewalk until stopped by a pretty young woman.
She turns out to be Nathalie, the cousin of one of Sam's companions, in
this town for the summer. Her family invites the three men to stay with
them, but Sam, now enamored of Nathalie, declines. He walks past her
house instead: "He saw a lady's wheel leaning against a pillar of the
porch. Did she ride? Instantly he thought of her flying along under the
elms, a vision of beauty on her wheel-for a pretty girl never looks so
pretty as when wheeling." Unlike the young man on the high-wheeler
who saw his statuette in Provence, Sam is transfixed by the vision of
Nathalie in motion, and her motion is reformulated as yet another
visual treat.60

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 89

Finally the opportunity to talk arrives:

"You are fond of riding?" asked Sam, astonished.

"I do nothing else."61

And they have even more in common: both like to stop and read and
dream along the way. They joke that they scorch downhill only.
The three travelers set out for a moonlit ride with Nathalie and her
brothers. The visual pleasure of watching her cycle excites Sam's
admiration still further: Nathalie rides "to perfection, sitting very
straight and running the wheel on a line." She daringly leads the way
across a stream on a single plank. The rest follow safely, but Sam,
distracted by love, falls in and breaks his leg. Back at her house for the
requisite nursing, Nathalie contritely ministers to him. Following the
inevitable engagement, the couple "took their wedding journey on the
latest of [bicycles] . . . and this summer, Sam Selover is wheeling, on
the sidewalks of Farley-a baby carriage."62
Although Nathalie is an active participant here and precipitates
Sam's fall into love, the stream, and her household, her role remains
little different from that of the Provengal statuette. On the other hand,
life beyond the boundaries of the formula is somewhat shifted: the two
will continue to venture into the world on their bicycles, and it is not
only the mother of the couple (her uterus no doubt strengthened by
riding) who exchanges her bicycle for a baby carriage. The use of this
formula, however, reassures the reader that women in motion on
bicycles, rather than standing still in doorways, do not excessively
disrupt convention, even literary convention.63

Writing against the Formula

That the formula of the injured man rescued into marriage came to
be considered something of a laughable cliche is suggested by an 1897
parody of the formula, "Willing Wheeler's Wheeling: A Bicycle Story,"
in which a man's attempt to fake an injury and thus woo Miss
Finlayson, "a pretty girl on a bicycle!" while being nursed goes awry.
His plan has been fed by reading too many romances.64
Writers such as Merington and Willard show women reveling in the
freedom afforded by bicycling. But, because letters to the editor rarely
appeared in this period's magazines, there is little direct evidence of
readers' responses to the formulaic stories. The threat the formulaic
stories recontain had been articulated in terms of both women's

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90 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

sexuality and independence. An explicit awareness of and response to

these formulas does appear in two stories that subvert, rather than
simply parody, these formulas. Both were published in magazines that
did not depend on bicycle advertisements. Here, the threat posed by
women's cycling is suddenly visible.
The new athleticism for women and girls increasingly permitted and
promoted in this period promised the new woman that she could leave
behind the specter of invalidism, that is, her body's own potential for
invalidism. And, in Kate Chopin's 1895 story "The Unexpected," the
bicycle facilitates escape from an invalid body-externalized as some-
one else's invalid body. Rather than recontaining the threat to propriety
and the established order implicit in women's bicycling, "The Unex-
pected" vividly dramatizes and celebrates it.
Randall and Dorothea are a passionate, engaged couple separated
when Randall contracts a wasting disease. Dorothea ardently antici-
pates his visit on his way south to recover but finds herself appalled and
repelled by his transformation. "This was not ... the man she loved and
had promised to marry.... The lips with which he had kissed her so
hungrily, and with which he was kissing her now, were dry and
parched, and his breath was feverish and tainted." Randall still asserts a
hold on her, however: "All the strength of his body had concentrated in
the clasp-the grasp with which he clung to her hand." He wants them
to marry immediately so that she can come along and nurse him, or,
alternatively have his money when he dies. Interrupted by a coughing
fit, he is helped away by his attendant before she can answer. We feel
her revulsion and understand that convention is about to close in on her:
''she realized that there would soon be people appearing whom she
would be forced to face and speak to." The expected outcome seems to
be that she will do the proper and dutiful thing: set aside her own
reactions, marry him, and go with him to nurse him. But the story takes
an unexpected turn: "Fifteen minutes later Dorothea had changed her
house gown and had mounted her 'wheel,' and was fleeing as if Death
himself pursued her." She rides far:

She was alone with nature; her pulses beating in unison with its sensuous
throb,... She had never spoken a word after bidding him good-bye; but now
she seemed disposed to make confidants of the tremulous leaves, or the
crawling and hopping insects, or the big sky into which she was staring.
"Never!" she whispered, "not for all his thousands. Never! never! not for
millions !"65

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 91

Bicycling allows Dorothea to escape duty and self-sacrifice as well

as strictly material considerations. Pressed to answer yes or no, she
takes to her wheel and escapes the deathly embrace of marriage. She
rides off, pulses beating, into sensuous, edenic solitude in which she
can refuse the marriage. In this story, bicycling arrives in high gear,
brakes off, as a threat to the social order. It allows a woman not only the
right, which might elsewhere be developed in abstract discussion, but
the wordless power to move beyond duty and affirm her physicality-
here, set in opposition to the grasping deadly power of diseased
marriage. It moves her far beyond the familiar trope of the woman as
nurturing caretaker to a conclusion that takes the formula in an
unexpected direction.
It is significant that "The Unexpected," in which bicycling figures so
unsettingly, was published in Vogue, which at the time was less a
fashion magazine than a society weekly, and often printed material that
twitted conventional bourgeois views. Emily Toth's discussion of
Chopin's publishing history suggests that Vogue took stories from
Chopin that the more conventional Century, Harper's, and Scribner's
would not accept.66 Its circulation was small and, moreover, it did not
depend heavily on advertising for its revenues; as one magazine
historian wrote, "its advertising business had never been properly
developed."67 The advertisements in Vogue were mainly for carriage-
trade retailers-silversmiths, Louis Sherry, and carriage makers them-
selves-rather than for such manufacturers as bicycle makers, as were
in the pages of Munsey's, McClure's, Godey's, and other magazines
that depended more heavily on advertising revenue or in Outing, which
was subsidized by a bicycle manufacturer. As we have seen, these
magazines printed fiction that defuses this apparent threat; this con-
trasts with Vogue's willingness to flaunt the license accessible to
women through bicycle riding.
The sense that bicycle advertising and the story are in the same
register, however, is fleetingly present. Chopin's story provides a
reading of what we saw in Figure 2, a common image in bicycle
magazine advertisements and catalogs-the woman riding off alone
into the countryside. "The Unexpected" rereads and rearticulates the
appeal of such images and plays out the fantasy of freedom that the
advertising graphics invite the female viewer to enter; Chopin, how-
ever, does not make it safe for those who might disapprove of such
independence by reassuring the reader that Dorothea's costume covers

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92 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

her toes. We do not know whether Dorothea sits very straig

to perfection," like Nathalie. Dorothea is not offered as the object of
spectatorship, an image of appealingly decorative riding, or "a pretty
girl on a bicycle" but as someone using the available technology to
make a break for freedom. Chopin thus wrenches the advertising
imagery from its lulling context and rereads both it and the threat of
women's riding as a heartening escape from constraint.
Chopin's anticourtship story, in which a courtship is unraveled and
only the woman rides off into solitary pleasure on her bicycle, draws on
and celebrates the same metaphoric connection between women's
independence and women's sexuality on the loose that the medical
discourse about bicycling and masturbation found so alarming. An
1896 Willa Cather story, "Tommy the Unsentimental," plays out the
bicycling woman's threat to gender definition.68
Unlike the cross-dressed Ethel of "Rosalind Awheel," whose excur-
sion leads both to reconfinement in her father's home and a suitable
match, or a character in another 1896 story, whose cross-dressed fast
ride leads to embarrassment,69 the ambiguously gendered Theodosia,
called Tommy, uses her riding prowess to rescue Jay Ellington Harper,
the ineffectual foppish young cashier from the East to whom she is
ostensibly engaged.
Tommy is the no-nonsense daughter of a banker in the West, where
'people rather expect some business ability in a girl . . . and they
respect it immensely." With her good sense and acumen, she repeatedly
bails Jay out by doing his work for him, and the attentions he shows
Tommy in exchange are attractive to her. And yet Jay clearly fails to
appreciate her. The people who do are the "Old Boys," her father's old
business friends. She reciprocates their feeling for her in her Western
way by playing billiards with them, mixing their cocktails, and taking
one herself occasionally. Jay, of course, disapproves of such acts, and
the Old Boys disapprove of Jay.70
The story layers an alternative model of gender onto the conventional
one. Here, whether people are male or female is sometimes less central
to either their sexual preference or gender roles than whether they are
Eastern or Western. The Western Old Boys, for example, have "rather
taken her mother's place."71
When Jay's father buys him a bank of his own twenty-five miles
away, Tommy often bicycles over "to straighten out the young man's

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 93

business for him." The Old Boys are concerned when Tommy goes East
to school for a year. "They did not like to see her gravitating toward the
East; it was a sign of weakening, they said, and showed an inclination
to experiment with another kind of life, Jay Ellington Harper's kind."
Nonetheless, she does well at school with what counts for the folks
back home-athletics-and returns acknowledging that Easterners are
not her sort. But she brings back with her a prototypical Easterner, "a
girl she had grown fond of at school, a dainty white, languid bit of a
thing, who used violet perfumes and carried a sunshade."72
Miss Jessica makes an impression on Jay, who evidently senses a
kindred spirit. While Cather leaves ambiguous the question of whether
Tommy will be losing Jessica to Jay, or Jay to Jessica if they get
together, Tommy's heroic bicycle ride at the climax of the story makes
clear that the two Easterners are fit only for one another, and neither
deserves Tommy.
When Jay telegraphs that he needs help by noon against a run on his
bank, Tommy decides to bring him money to pay off his depositors,
though the only way to do so is a difficult bicycle trip. Miss Jessica,
seeking a grand gesture to impress Jay, comes too. But when Tommy
refuses to stop and rest and drink water and instead "bent over her
handle bars, . . . [i]t flashed upon Miss Jessica that Tommy was not onl
very unkind, but that she sat very badly on her wheel and looked
aggressively masculine and professional when she bent her shoulders
and pumped like that.... Miss Jessica drops out half-way along and
asks Tommy to tell Jay that she would do anything to save him.
Miss Jessica sees in Tommy precisely the sort of riding that manuals
warn women to avoid and that, we have seen, is associated with saddle
masturbation. Tommy's scorching posture and lack of moderation,
however, bring results in an extraordinary riding feat. The 1896 record
for men on racing bicycles on a paved flat track was twenty miles in
forty-five minutes. Tommy rides twenty-five miles on a rough, un-
paved, uphill road in the hot sun, not on a racing bike and carrying a
heavy canvas bag, in seventy-five minutes.
She arrives in the nick of time, moneybag in hand, scolds Jay for his
poor business practices, and tells him where he can find Miss Jessica. "I
left her all bunched up by the road like a little white rabbit.... I'll tend
bank; you'd better get your wheel and go and look her up and comfort
her. And as soon as it is convenient, Jay, I wish you'd marry her and be

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94 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

done with it. I want to get this thing off my mind." Jay is shocked; he
thought he was engaged to Tommy. Masculinity once again becomes an
operative term as he thanks Tommy for what she's done for him:

"I didn't believe any woman could be at once so kind and clever. You
almost made a man of me."
"Well I certainly didn't succeed,"

she replies and sends him along.74

Tommy has played for a time the role familiar from the formulaic
stories of helping out the immobilized man, here immobilized by his
own shortcomings instead of by an accident. But she is not interested in
reducing her sphere and bringing him into it, in entering a sphere as
limited as his own, or in bringing both into the "spirit of the family
circle." A life of fast riding in the larger sphere of action and
Westernness is clearly superior to either Jay's world of incompetence
Miss Jessica's adjoining world of decorum. Concern with decorousness
and decorum may promise to make its practitioners fine advertising
illustrations but actually leaves one of them bunched up by the side of
the road "like a little white rabbit."
Although Cather and the story approve of Tommy and behavior
classified as "Western," Cather's portrayal of Tommy's riding clearly
links leaning over, scorching, and immoderation in riding with "mascu-
line" traits and attitudes. And, although Tommy has used her bicycle to
visit her ostensible fiance, bicycling here is not recuperated or pro-
moted as an advantageous new form of heterosexual socializing that
leads to a "new bond of union." Rather, it becomes a means for a
woman to more fully encompass and investigate the world, a test
dividing the autonomous woman from the fops and the rabbits.75
The story was published in The Home Monthly, intended as a genteel
and moral entertainment; as Cather's biographer Sharon O'Brien notes,
Tommy's cocktail-mixing abilities were hardly the skills the publisher
wished to recommend to his teetotalling readers.76 But the story
appeared in the first issue that Cather edited, and she wrote half the
copy to make up for the absence of a file of manuscripts on hand. Under
the circumstances, she may have felt licensed to use work she had
already written or to please herself by publishing a story that subverted
the conventions of bicycling stories, as she does here. Perhaps it helped
that The Home Monthly's advertisements were mostly for local mer-
chants, not national manufacturers.

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 95

Conclusion

The nationally distributed middle-class magazines took on the

project of defusing the threatening commodity and making it salable by
asserting scenarios in which it upheld and renewed the traditional
social order. Within these scenarios, played out repeatedly within
formulaic fiction, bicycles no longer threaten to erode gender distinc-
tions or to make riders loose women.
The advertising-dependent magazines' makeover of women's bicy-
cling in a more decorous image may have been appreciated by women
who wanted to ride, as is suggested in accounts such as that of Annie
Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College. Meyer took up bicycling
early and touts her approach to it as an example of her "shrewd theory
that to put any radical scheme across, it must be done in the most
conservative manner possible." In distinction to Willard's and others'
advocacy of the bicycle costume as a first step toward dress reform,
Meyer adopted the protective coloration of a "well tailored suit ... and
modest hat" so that "there was nothing about me to indicate that I was
not a genteel conservative, though I was engaged in an exceptional and
pioneering act."77
The mainstream magazines' defusing of the bicycle's threatening
aspects through attractive images in advertisements and through formu-
laic fiction perhaps provided similar protective coloration and made it
easier and more acceptable for women to take up bicycling-and
women did make up an estimated quarter to a third of the bicycle
market by the end of the decade. The magazines recast or read out of
the discourse the possibility that bicycling might send women riding off
alone, outside of or away from marriage. The stories instead suggest
that the bicycle is simply an aid to making an improved version of
heterosexual marriage.
Roads branch out in many directions from women's bicycling in the
1890s. The marketing of bicycles in retrospect appears as a test drive
for the subsequent marketing of the automobile, where again we see
differentiated men's and women's versions, rapid deployment in fiction
and social experience as an aid to courtship, and a mixed impact on
women's lives.78 Bicycling did undoubtedly provide an impetus to dress
reform and helped make lighter, less restrictive clothing acceptable. It
made new forms of women's athleticism acceptable as well and pressed
toward greater freedom of travel for women.

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96 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

The "bicycle craze" ended around 1898.79 Prices dropped drasti-

cally-from $150 in the early 1890s to $10 by the end-because of
production improvements and, arguably, because the well-to-do market
was saturated. Women and men continued to ride, but bicycles were no
longer a genteel novelty, and manufacturers no longer found it profit-
able to advertise heavily in middle-class magazines. Editorial content
followed advertising, and stories and articles featuring bicycles faded
out of magazines about that time.
Working together within the larger framework of the magazine,
advertising and fiction made a seemingly threatening new product
attractive to potential users. While advertisements could address a
specific manifestation of the threat by promoting a new product such as
the "hygienic" saddle to take care of it, the larger issues raised by
women's increased mobility could not be headed off as easily. Maga-
zine stories took on those issues by rewriting the product's apparent
threat to traditional roles. They subsume the potential conflict within a
discourse of consumption. Soon after, automobiles began appearing in
magazine stories-but that's another story.

NOTES

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Northeast Modern Language
Association in 1991, the Modern Language Association in 1991, and the Berkshire
Conference on the History of Women in 1993. For their generous readings and thought-
provoking comments on various versions of this paper, I wish to thank Joe Broderick,
Peter Conn, Regina Kunzel, Richard Ohmann, Kathy Peiss, Janice Radway, Peter
Stallybrass, and the editorial board and readers of American Quarterly. I am indebted,
too, to present and former writing group members Jane Holzka, Harriet Jackson, Ellen
Kellman, Nancy Robertson, Nina Warnke, and Vera Whisman for readings and
rereadings.
1. Maria E. Ward, Bicycling for Ladies: The Common Sense of Bicycling (New York,
1896), 12-13.
2. H. 0. Carrington, "As to the Bicycle," American Midwife 2 (1896): 16; quoted in
John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America
(Urbana, Ill., 1974), 184.
3. See, for example, Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class
Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989); and Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of
Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985).
4. William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertis-
ing: Persons, Products, and Images of Well-Being (New York, 1986), 121. Leiss,
Kline, and Jhally draw on Merle Curti, "The Changing Concept of 'Human Nature' in

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 97

the Literature of American Advertising," Business History Review 41 (winter 1967):

335-53. Jackson Lears locates the roots of this shift around 1910, when the "Reason
Why" approach promised the consumer a "richer, fuller life" from using the product.
Other advertising historians, such as Stephen Fox and Susan Strasser, show advertising
by atmosphere and association beginning to displace hard-sell copy around 1915, while
Roland Marchand similarly finds advertisers before World War I only just beginning to
shift to "selling the benefit instead of the product. .. prestige instead of automobiles,
sex appeal instead of mere soap"; they were focusing, in other words, on the pleasures
and psychic advantages of owning it. T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-
Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-
1930," in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of
Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York, 1983), 18;
Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators
(New York, 1984), 70-72; Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the
American Mass Market (New York, 1989), 159-61; Roland Marchand, Advertising the
American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1986), 10.
In the three-dimensional realm, department stores in the 1880s already sold goods by
association through lavish displays that associated goods variously with elegance,
luxury, glamour, refined taste, and exoticism. (See, for example, William Leach, The
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture [New
York, 1993].)
5. Leiss, Kline, and Jhally, Social Communication, 124; Marchand, Advertising the
American Dream, 105-8.
6. The rare exceptions to this rule were an already suspect class of women: stage
performers who used the high wheeler in an act. Women could ride the cumbersome
carriage-like tricycle sometimes known as a fairy tricycle; riders sat on a bench
between two large wheels and steered a small wheel in front. Riding the high wheeler
and the tricycle were seen as complementary gendered activities. See Ellen Garvey,
"Commercial Fiction: Advertising and Fiction in American Magazines, 1880s to
1910s" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992).
7. The bicycles on which Lancelot and his knights ride to Hank Morgan's rescue in
Twain's 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court are the manly high
wheelers. An 1880s enthusiast in a bicycling magazine similarly establishes riding the
high wheeler as a masculine and chivalrous pursuit: ". . . gallant knights and true are
they; / Full hard they ride, oft brook mischance, / And daring feats full oft essay, / For
maiden's praise or tender glance" (Basil Webb, "A Ballade of This Age," The
Wheelman 3 [Oct. 1883]: 100).
8. Max Vander Weyde, "A Turn of the Wheel," Godey's Lady's Book 117 (Dec.
1888): 480.
9. See for example Emily Lennox's stories "A Love Game," Godey's Lady's Book
117 (Oct. 1888): 295-99; and "The Unbidden Guest: An Episode in a Country House,"
Godey's Lady's Book 117 (Nov. 1888): 349-60. The formula is common in Munsey's
in the 1890s as well. For a discussion of a similar pattern in British women's novels of
the mid-nineteenth century, see Sally Mitchell, "Sentiment and Suffering: Women's
Recreational Reading in the 1860s," Victorian Studies 21 (autumn 1977): 29-45.
10. Paper dolls advertising Columbia bicycles for women's use, 1895, Joseph
Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library, 78x317.12
11. Envoy and Fleetwing: advertisement for the Buffalo Cycle Co., The Century 53
(Feb. 1896): 38.
12. Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (New York, 1929),
410.

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98 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

13. For a fuller discussion of the bicycle and tourism, see Gary Allan Tobin, "The
Bicycle Boom of the 1890s: The Development of Private Transportation and the Birth
of the Modern Tourist," Journal of Popular-Culture 7 (spring 1974): 838-49.
14. See Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the
Popular Press (Lexington, Ky., 1990), for a discussion of the treatment of women's
athleticism in the satiric press. Martha Banta also discusses the importance of the image
of the woman on the bicycle and asserts that the visual image of the American girl as
bicyclist helped form new conceptions of what women might do and be (Imaging
American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History [New York, 1987], 88).
15. Frances E. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle: Reflections of an
Influential Nineteenth-Century Woman, rev. ed. of A Wheel within a Wheel (1896;
Sunnyvale, Calif., 1991), 43.
16. Ward, Bicycling for Ladies, 12-13.
17. Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers, 174.
18. Marguerite Merington, "Woman and the Bicycle," Scribner's 17 (June 1895):
703.
19. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, 32, 74.
20. See, for example, Arthur Bird, M.D., "Is Bicycling Harmful," Godey's Magazine
132 (Apr. 1896): 374; and J. West Roosevelt, "A Doctor's View of Bicycling,"
Scribner's 17 (June 1895): 708. A notable exception to this practice is Ward's
Bicycling for Ladies, with photographs by Alice Austen. Ward not only celebrates the
autonomy the bicycle afforded women but augments it with thorough instructions on
bicycle repair and adjustment. In a chapter titled "Position and Power," Ward discusses
the seat solely in terms of the physical mechanics of riding. Willard, How I Learned to
Ride the Bicycle, 58.
21. E. D. Page, "Women and the Bicycle," Brooklyn Medical Journal 11 (1897): 84.
See also Thomas Lothrop and William Potter, "Women and the Bicycle," Buffalo
Medical Journal 35 (Nov. 1895): 348-49.
22. Karin L. F. Calvert, "To Be a Child: An Analysis of the Artifacts of Childhood"
(Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1984), 191, 152. Page, "Women and the Bicycle,"
84.
23. R. L. Dickinson, "Bicycling for Women from the Standpoint of the Gynecolo-
gist," American Journal of Obstetrics 21 (1895): 25; cited in Haller and Haller, The
Physician and Sexuality, 185.
24. W. E. Fitch, "Bicycle-Riding: Its Moral Effect upon Young Girls and Its Relation
to Diseases of Women," Georgia Journal of Medicine and Surgery 4 (1899): 155-56.
25. Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist," in The Return of
Sherlock Holmes (1903; New York, 1963), 84. The story is set in 1895.
26. George Napheys, A.M., M.D., The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the
Maiden, Wife, and Mother (Philadelphia, 1884), 40.
27. Mary Wood-Allen, What a Young Girl Ought to Know (Philadelphia, 1897), 106;
cited in Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality.
28. See Napheys, Physical Life of Woman, 40.
29. Lina Beard and Adelia Beard: The American Girl's Handy Book: How to Amuse
Yourself and Others (New York, 1898), 471.
30. Gormully and Jeffery Manufacturing Co. Rambler bicycles catalog, 1893, 23.
31. Luther H. Porter, Cycling for Health and Pleasure (New York, 1895), 52.
32. Automatic Cycle Seat, Harper's Weekly, 11 Apr. 1896, 367.
33. The Sager Pneumatic Bicycle Seat, Harper's Weekly, 11 Apr. 1896, 371.
34. Dominion Monthly and Ontario Medical Journal 7 (1896): 504, 11; Dominion

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 99

Monthly and Ontario Medical Journal (1898): 28, 30; cited in Patricia Vertinsky, The
Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth
Century (Manchester, England, 1990), 75.
35. "Psyche" quoted in Porter, Cycling for Health and Pleasure, 18-20.
36. Rambler advertisement, The Century 50 (June 1894): 38.
37. See, for example, Henry Garrigues, "Woman and the Bicycle," Forum 21 (Jan.
1896): 576-87. Garrigues, a doctor, proclaims that, by bicycling, a woman "far from
diminishing her fitness for this supreme act in her life [childbirth], actually renders
herself more capable of meeting the ordeal" ("Woman and the Bicycle," 582).
38. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, 43. Columbia bicycles advertise-
ment, Harper's Weekly, 25 July 1896, 38.
39. Merington, "Woman and the Bicycle," 703.
40. For more discussion on this, see Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right:
Birth Control in America (New York, 1990), 133-55.
41. Americanness was assumed to be white, as well as native born. Although one
bicycle historian notes that a homemade bicycle devised by a young black man who
"according to Cycle magazine could not buy, rent, or borrow a bicycle" caused a stir in
the mid-1890s (James Wagenvoord, Bikes and Riders [New York, 1972], 89), the
presence of such an anomalous piece of exotica only consolidated the notion that "real"
bicycling was a white middle-class pursuit, and other people taking it up could do so
only in grotesque imitation. African Americans did ride bicycles, though they are
absent from magazine imagery of riding. Outing magazine, in April 1893, reported that
the League of American Wheelmen convention had been embroiled in a fight ending
only with the narrow defeat of an amendment barring black people from membership;
the controversy was expected to continue. The league, begun by manufacturer Albert
Pope, campaigned for better roads, organized races and clubs, arranged for discounts at
inns, and did much to shape the practice and image of bicycling. (See Outing 22 [Apr.
1893], 10.)
In the only story seen for this study in which a black cyclist appears, he is a servant
accompanying a girls' tricycling club on its tour; although he rides, he is not included
in the count of riders (E. Vinton Blake, "The Girls' Tricycle Club and Its Run down the
Cape," St. Nicholas 13 [May 1886]).
42. These changes and their repercussions are laid out most cogently in Richard
Ohmann, "Where Did Mass Culture Come From? The Case of the Magazines" and
"Advertising and the New Discourse of Mass Culture," in Politics of Letters (Middletown,
Conn., 1987); Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization"; and Christopher Wilson,
"The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-Market Magazines and the Demise of the Gentle
Reader, 1880-1920," in Culture of Consumption; and Leiss, Kline, and Jhally, Social
Communication.
43. See Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the
Progressive Era (Athens, Ga., 1985).
44. Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 363.
45. Cleveland Moffett, "Great Business Enterprises: The Marvels of Bicycle
Making," McClure's (Feb.-May 1897), 50 pages paginated separately from both
editorial and advertising sections. Others in this series of what would now be called
advertorials-one for shoes and another for pianos-are more clearly flagged as
advertisements. Pope's twelve-page condensation of the advertising articles in a
booklet calls itself a reprint of a McClure's article (Cleveland Moffett, How a Bicycle
Is Made: One of America's Great Industries, n.d., Bella Landauer Collection, New-
York Historical Society, box: Bicycles 2).

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100 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

46. Terdiman suggests in his discussion of nineteenth-century French newspapers

that the juxtaposition of such unrelated elements in the newspaper works against the
containment or harmonization of conflict and normalizes fragmentation. American
magazines of this period operate rather differently (Richard Terdiman, Discourse!
Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-
Century France [Ithaca, N.Y., 1985], 122-24).
47. For more on editors' and advertisers' common interest in what was cast as
"progressive" advertising, see Garvey, "Commercial Fiction," 13-15.
48. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago, 1988), 10.
49. Joseph Bishop, "Social and Economic Influence of the Bicycle," Forum 21 (Aug.
1896): 680-89.
50. See Maude Cooke, Social Etiquette; or Manners and Customs of Polite Society
(n.p., 1899), 343-44. It may be that the bicycle simply extended to the genteel middle
class the upper-class acceptance of a young unmarried woman's horseback riding alone
with a young man. This may have been acceptable, Louis Auchincloss suggests,
because outdoor activities were seen as inherently wholesome (Auchincloss's com-
mentary in Florence Adele Sloan, Maverick in Mauve: The Diary of a Romantic Age
[Garden City, N.Y., 1983], 126).
51. This may have been a specifically American notion, at least as it appears in
fiction. In H. G. Wells's The Wheels of Chance (London, 1896), bicycling allows a
draper's assistant to be mistaken for a genteel, educated man and get entangled in a
love plot. In Maurice Leblanc's Voici des ailes! (Paris, 1898), a bicycle trip sets off a
rash of spouse swapping, Stephen Kern reports in The Culture of Time and Space,
1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
52. Flora Lincoln Comstock, "Rosalind Awheel," Godey's Magazine 132 (Apr.
1896), 388-93.
53. Godey's Magazine in this period was no longer the genteel mainstay of women's
magazines it had been as Godey's Lady's Book but was attempting-ultimately
unsuccessfully-to shape a more commercial identity; it dropped its price to ten cents
in 1894. See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1885-1905
(Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 5, 87; and John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The
Magazine in America, 1741-1990 (New York, 1991), 36.
54. Adelaide Rouse, "The Story of a Story," Munsey's, October 1896.
55. Ibid., 47.
56. Bishop, "Social and Economic Influence of the Bicycle," 684.
57. Bernice Rogers, "The Reverend Abiel-Convert," The Household 29 (Nov.
1896): 6.
58. Harry St. Maur, "To Hymen on a Wheel," The Home Magazine 8 (Aug. 1897).
59. John Seymour Wood, "A Dangerous Sidepath: A Story of the Wheel," Outing 22
(June 1893): 209.
60. Ibid., 212.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 213, 214.
63. For a discussion of a children's story in St. Nicholas magazine that uses some of
the same elements, Gabrielle Jackson's "The Colbum Prize," see Garvey, "Commer-
cial Fiction," 339-42.
64. Charles H. Day, "Willing Wheeler's Wheeling: A Bicycle Story," The Home
Magazine 8 (Aug. 1897): 137.
65. Kate Chopin, "The Unexpected," in A Vocation and a Voice: Stories (1895; New
York, 1991), 91, 90, 92, 93. Originally published in Vogue, 18 Sept. 1895.

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 REFRAMING THE BICYCLE 101

66. Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York, 1990), 253, 279.
67. Mott, History of American Magazines, 759.
68. Willa Cather, "Tommy, the Unsentimental" (1896), in Women on Women: An
Anthology of American Lesbian Short Fiction, ed., Joan Nestle and Naomi Holoch
(New York, 1990). Originally in (Pittsburgh) Home Monthly 6 (Aug. 1896).
The significance of the fact that the writers I cite here who subvert the formula are
canonical ones is not that greatness breaks the mold but that, although these stories
appeared in relatively obscure magazines, the writers' later fame and the still later
feminist scholarly interest in them made the stories available in modern collections.
Counter-formulaic stories may have been published in less-commercial magazines by
writers who stayed obscure as well.
69. See Virginia Niles Leeds, "A Coast and a Capture: A Bicycling Story,"
McClure's 7 (July 1896): 122-26.
70. Cather, "Tommy," 9.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 10, 11.
73. Ibid., 13.
74. Ibid., 15.
75. Setting the story in the somewhat exotic rural West, incidentally at a consider-
able distance from the main market for bicycles, may have made such a vision of
bicycling less threatening. Poor roads in rural regions as well as the depression of 1893
that cut into farmers' incomes meant that few people living in rural areas owned
bicycles.
76. Sharon O'Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York, 1987), 227.
O'Brien sees Cather's subversion here as the substitution of a male plot for a female
one, a switch from romance to adventure story.
77. Annie Nathan Meyer, It's Been Fun (New York, 1951), 5.
78. See Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor
Age (New York, 1991).
79. Among the historians who give this date are Robert A. Smith, A Social History
of the Bicycle: Its Early Life and Times in America (New York, 1972).

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