Women on Wheels: How Women Found Freedom through Bicycling

A Virtual Lecture by Ellen Gruber Garvey, PHD

Suggested donation $5. Advance registration required to receive the Zoom link.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER (https://ci.ovationtix.com/35606/production/1035687?performanceId=10603348)

Sponsored by Grove Street Bicycles

Is it surprising that in the 1890s conservatives panicked at visions of women riding alone, with other women, or with unsuitable men, and campaigned to stop them? Some claimed that women would damage themselves by acquiring a “bicycle face,” or would get sexual pleasure from bicycling — and thus ruin their reproductive capacities. When women and girls first rode bicycles in large numbers, they celebrated their new freedom to move around in the world. Susan B. Anthony thought bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” Other suffragists praised bicycling as a road to fuller citizenship for women: women would travel more widely on their own, and would learn a larger sense of responsibility to their fellow travelers.

Women on Wheels is supported by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities through the “NJ Women Vote: The 19th Amendment at 100” initiative.

Zoom can be accessed online via a computer or mobile device, you just need Wifi. To download Zoom and create a free account on a desktop or laptop, go to https://zoom.us and follow the onsite instructions. To download on a smartphone/mobile device, please download the Zoom app from the AppStore and follow the setup instructions. Make sure you’ve updated to the most recent version.