Men, Women and the Bicycle in the Late Nineteenth Century 1

Social geographers have spent much of the last two decades investigating the influence of gender on geography. They have sought specifically to understand the spatial effects of the social construction of femininity and masculinity in both contemporary and historical societies. On the strength of countless studies, geographers of gender confidently assert the importance of gender in and on the social production of space, place, landscape, and environment. Here we examine the gendered construction of space and society by cyclists in the late nineteenth century. The spaces through which cyclists so visibly passed included the streets, highways, paths and parks of the Victorian city and countryside, while the places where they reinforced their identities included club-houses, photographers’ studios, racetracks, gymnasia and even their own parlours. Men and women on bicycles, particularly in the 1890s, undertook a purposeful occupation of these urban and rural geographies as cycling flâneurs. In so doing, cyclists also promoted well-established constructions and divisions of gender. In an age marked by conspicuous consumption, ² many women interpreted the safety bicycle as a domestic vehicle for “ladies”, well suited to what Phillip Gordon Mackintosh has called the ‘domestic public’. ³ Many bourgeois men resisted this by expressing masculinity and masculine activity in opposition to the increase of urban effeminacy. ⁴ Conspicuous use of the highwheel bicycle was, for example, an overt expression of ‘cavalier masculinity’ in resistance to bourgeois domestic propriety. ⁵ Apparently, women and men used the bicycle not only as a form of transportation, but also as a means of gender identity.