ABSTRACT

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. This chapter demonstrates the gendered construction of space and society, especially as it concerned cycling in the late nineteenth century, which shaped Victorian understandings of not only cycling, but the spaces and places where it occurred. It discusses the connection between gender and bicycle and tricycle technology. The chapter demonstrates that class and gender intimately bind with the late Victorian cycling impulse. Contemporary popular culture largely misunderstands the social geography of Victorian women. Women and men attending and rejecting the constructions of gender advanced by bourgeois Victorian society, and its prescriptions of domestic probity, participated in different yet overlapping forms of gendered cycling.