Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels by Hannah Ross

Friends! Today is publication day for The Memory Palace: True Stories of the Past by the one and only Nate DiMeo. Just a reminder in case anyone wanted to get it from their library. 

My husband gave me Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels by Hannah Ross as a gift because he really wants me to become a cyclist, but the truth is that I mostly see riding my bicycle as a means of transportation and so I don't romanticize it the way he does. But I also really love that feeling when you haven't been on your bike in a while and then you get on it and you're super tall and you can go really fast and it makes you feel powerful, so maybe I'm a bit of a hypocrite. ANYWAY. It took me years to read this book and I don't know why.

This book chronicles the rise of the bicycle in the late 1800s and how it was linked to women's rights, particularly women's suffrage and how the bicycle continues to have immeasurable impact on the lives of women today. From suffragettes who used bicycles to flee from arson crimes to Victorian ladies who chronicled their cycling adventures in best-selling travelogues to women competing in races today, this book covers the entire gamut of cycling history through a feminist lens. 

And that's what is stopping this book from being amazing. It's trying to cover too much! It's a bit disorganized to my eyes. It's not chronological, but keeps flipping back and forth in time. I sort of wish it had just really focused on cycling in the late 1800s and early 1900s and then she should have written a second book with the modern issues of women in cycling. There's certainly plenty of material for two books.

But I learned so much from this book and I honestly had no idea how important an invention the bicycle was! 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Sociologists now credit the bicycle with a decrease in genetic faults associated with inbreeding in the U.K., and as early as the 1900s, the U.S. Census Office identified the invention as a game-changer: "Few articles ever used by man have created so great a revolution in social conditions as the bicycle." (page 18-19)

Egads!! I never even thought about it, but what an important step towards travel more than a few miles away from your home. 

She held up cycling as pivotal in helping the cause of dress reform...(page 49)

This is what I really thought was interesting. "Rational" dressing to make women's clothing safer and easier to wear was around before bicycles, but it didn't really take off until the impetus of dressing to ride became more widespread. 

In the 1850s, Amelia [Jenks Bloomer], alongside fellow feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Elizabeth Smith Miller, started wearing billowy Turkish-style trousers which came to the ankle and a knee-length skirt or dress over the top. it was named the "freedom dress," much as Susan B. Anthony later referred to the bicycle as a "freedom-machine" - both represented independence and autonomy through freedom of movement. (page 49)

I'm going to start calling my bike my "freedom-machine."

A 2019 survey carried out in San Francisco showed that only 13 percent of cyclists in the city are women of color, with Asian and Hispanic women the least represented - a low figure when you consider that 34 percent of the population of the city are women of color. Many of those interviewed said that "women like me" don't bike, that they saw it as a predominantly young, white, male activity. As ever, representation matters. The problem isn't isolated to San Francisco, but an issues across the county and elsewhere.*

* This is far from a problem just in the United States. In London, for instance, black, Asian and minority ethnic groups- across both genders - account for only around 15 percent of the city's cycle trips despite making up 41 percent of the city's population. (page 91)

Now that I read this, it makes so much sense. Most cyclists I see are white men. *sigh*

Freedom, mobility, autonomy and fearlessness are core the group's [the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade - a cycling group for "womxn" of color] ethos, something Xela [de la X, a musician and community activist] felt she was acutely lacking when she was growing up. While her brothers were free to roam, she was largely confined indoors - take up space in the streets with her cycling sisters is an act of defiance. Some of the other members say they also weren't encouraged to ride as children, because their parents' generations didn't' think it was something girls should do; others said that they rode as children but gave up when they got older due to harassment or disapproval. (page 94) 

Sad. Parents, let's try to keep those girls riding those bikes for as long as we can!

While she [Elizabeth Robins Pennell, cycling memoirist of the 1880s and 1890s] may be a bit of a snob, she's often witty and acerbic, such as her observation that the tour groups who had once "wept over the sublimities of nature which they could not see for their tears," now barely glance at the landscape and "let their feelings loose upon illustrated postcards" instead. I dread to think what she would have made of twenty-first-century selfie culture. (page 160)

This entire paragraph made me chortle. 

When I type "women solo travel" into Google, "Is solo female travel safe?" is one of the first things that comes up under the "People also ask" section. Yet the idea of men going it alone in the wilderness has always been accepted and celebrated as a masculine rite of passage, the rugged frozen-beard archetypes who resort to eating their dogs as they cross Antarctica or the intrepid adventurers getting lost in the Amazon and living with an undiscovered tribe. Their stories are embedded in our history, with accounts by women who've done similar journeys often forgotten and overlooked. The writer Kate Harris, who has cycled the length of the Silk Road, observed that women explorers are too often bracketed as making such journeys as a way to "find themselves," in response to an emotional crisis of some kind. Such an outlook restricts female adventuring to an Eat Pray Love self-discovery narrative, and a way of feminizing their experiencer. They aren't seen as exploring for the sake of adventure, but rather fleeing from something. 

It's also true that while men are free to be rugged, fearless and independent explorers, women who want to do the same regularly complain that they are subjected to interrogations about their plans, a list of risks they could encounters and moral judgments if they have children. (page 191-192)

Yeah, I have to admit that Ross spent a great deal of time chronicling Annie Londonderry's ride around the world in 1894-1895 and all I really wanted Ross to tell me was who was taking care of her children back home. I know full well it wasn't her husband, so who was sacrificing her life (you know it was a woman) so that Londonderry could ride around unencumbered for a year. 

And it felt shitty, but I was judging Londonderry hard-core throughout the entire story. I am 100% positive I would not have judged a man. 

Things I looked up:

fin-de-siècle (page 18) - a French term meaning 'end of century'; without context, the term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century

soigneur (page 223) - a non-riding member of a racing team whose role is to provide support (such as massages, supplies, and transportation) for the cyclists.

Hat mentions (why hats?):

Maria [Ward] is in the center wearing what looks like rationals, with the other women mostly in long skirts, puff-sleeved blouses and fancy hats, while the men wear knee-length breeches, long socks and straw boaters. (page 69)

Mary [Kingsley] wasn't so keen to be labeled a "New Woman," however, deeming the question of women's suffrage of minor importance and making her way through the jungle in the traditional nineteenth-century English attire of long dress, hat and umbrella. (page 161)

One pictures shows Elsa [von Blumen] wearing buttoned-up leather ankle boots, a peaked hat, and neatly fitting bloomers and jacket, with a little fringed skirt over the top; no female high-wheeler would have risked a long skirt. (page 228)

Maud Watson, winner of the first ever Wimbledon ladies' singles title, did so wearing an all-white ensemble of woolen ankle-length skirt complete with small bustle, long-sleeved silk blouse and sailor hat. (page 232)