Happy (belated) Women’s History Month! It literally took me all month to research and write this, so even though it was a goal of mine to get it out while it was still Women’s History month, here we are. This is bound to be a controversial assertion, and is a deeply personal response to many experiences I’ve had, local and otherwise. I know there may be some who take it as a criticism or attack, but it is not meant as one. Although this topic is a really tough one, it’s a critical topic I feel the need to address.

Also, for folks who don’t know this yet, mobility and transit are social justice issues. Biking is not and never has been apolitical, and mobility advocacy arguments must be feminist and anti-racist to be just. We can get there y’all. This is a call-in moment.

First some definitions.

Feminism: the idea that women are, and ought to be, treated equal to men in all spheres of life. “Feminism advocates women’s emancipation and empowerment,” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment

Cyclo-feminism: the concept of feminism through or because of bicycling and/or in the bicycling industry. This concept originates from the very real historical tie between the invention (and wide spread use of) the bicycle and the push for women’s suffrage.

Racism: Dr. Ibram X. Kendi defines racism as, “…any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.” and specifically defines anti-black racism (which is what my argument largely focuses on) as, “any idea suggesting that Black people, or any group of Black people, are inferior in any way to another racial group.”

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If you have been following Cyclonauts’ facebook, you may have already read a variety of articles documenting how the bicycle drove the suffragette and early feminist movements. Even if you haven’t, you may be familiar with the key tie-in between the bicycle and women’s suffrage: the rational dress movement. You may already be familiar with some of the key figures like Susan B. Anthony, Annie Londonderry, Frances Willard, and Maria Ward. Lesser known are figures like Kittie Knox and Lillias Campbell Davidson.

This topic is one I think about a lot, especially in the face of growing discussions in the bicycling movement/industry about Equity and Inclusion, and the growing awareness regarding Intersectionality within feminism (especially among white feminists). Even as I want to celebrate these historical women– my own values demand that I be accountable by really examining and sitting with the racism inherent in the work, elevation, and continued celebration (without acknowledgement) of some of these women.

I think that white women cyclofeminists have a lot of work to do, especially as we become the industries new preferred target market. As white women, we, like Georgena Terry and Sky Yaeger have typically been the first and most able to enter industries typically reserved for (white) men (as long as we’re “the good ones”). As white women, we have long been positioned to use our privileges in society to turn the focus on ourselves and away from marginalized communities that experience more barriers to cycling than white people.

Let’s start with Susan B. Anthony:

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

This oft-used quote to celebrate the feminist history of the bicycle leaves out of this is all the other stuff behind Susan B. Anthony’s fight for the vote. Even though she was a hard-fighting abolitionist, she was also an anti-black racist, saying in response to the the ratification of the 15th amendment,

I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman,

Many other white women of the time felt the same way, and while previously they had worked for the abolition of slavery, they were absolutely against the rights of citizenship (including the right to vote) for blacks (specifically for black men before white women).

This exclusion of black women from the 1920 win of women’s suffrage resulted in the denial of full rights of citizenship to women of color in American until 1965. That denial has deep impacts today, including on working conditions and wages for women of color. This exclusion seemed to cement after the passage of the 15th amendment, infiltrating even the League of American Wheelmen– (which went on to become the League of American Bicyclists), which after Anthony’s comments in 1879, passed a “color bar” in 1894 for league membership. Kittie Knox challenged this by attending the membership meeting in 1895, only successfully maintaining her membership until her death in 1900 because it predated the addition of the word ‘white’ in 1894.



This color bar remained “on the books” until it was officially repudiated in 1999.

Whether or not the League continued to enforce it after the passage of civil rights laws in 1965 is less clear, but the legacy of people of color being barred from membership in the League of American Bicyclists is still with us today, as evidenced by the the Leagues Equity work.

I think we are beginning to see how bicycling, like almost everything else in this country, became racialized during emancipation and crystallized during Jim Crow segregation. The disparities in participation and representation that are observed in cycling and the cycling industry now are an obvious legacy of the last 153 years of post-slavery anti-black racist policies.

This is not to say we cannot find strength in the resonance of Susan B. Anthony’s words about the bicycle, but that when we use that to express how we feel the bicycle is a tool for women’s liberation, we have to keep in mind that many of the women who were most vocal about their joy of bicycling were educated, white, and middle class or better. Susan B. Anthony was not an equal opportunity feminist; she did not want rights for all women. Poor women and women of color were not restricted to a life of little work indoors, and would largely have been excluded from contemporaneous conversations about the benefits of bicycling. This is why there was backlash both to the rational dress movement (it was unfeminine) and why even prominent women advocating for women to “ride the wheel” cautioned against over-exertion or riding for sport. Middle-class women may have been willing to flout conventions to ride; but they would not willingly give up the markers of white, middle class femininity. In “Handbook for Lady Cyclists,” Davidson writes against women’s racing, “a woman’s nervous system suffers a hundred times more than a man’s from this excitement.” echoing anti-cycling arguments and beliefs at the time that exercise was at best unfeminine, and at worst detrimental to women’s health and well-being. Conspicuously, poor white women and black women were left out of discussions of the supposed connection between health, well-being, and work. The beliefs about ideal femininity as a passive, home bound experience went so far as connect work to beliefs that women in poverty and women of color were less womanly or even unfeminine. These pernicious beliefs linger with us today, and we can see some of them at work whenever women athletes are described as unfeminine or have their gender identities questioned.



I drew inspiration for talking about these ideas from reading Sojourner Truth’s “ain’t I a woman?” speech, in which she pushed back on these ideals of femininity and also advocated for black women’s suffrage a time when many white suffragettes were moving away from it. It’s important to note the racism inherent in the differences in how the speech was transcribed– although Sojourner was renowned as being a very effective speaker, the version of the speech transcribed by a white woman is written as if it was given in ‘dialect’. I am quoting the non-dialect version (which notably does not include the phrase, ‘ain’t I woman’, though it is implied). She said,

I am for woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now.

These statements are more akin to the kind of things we might advocate for today regarding women’s rights and capacity. But when we think of gaps in cycling participation, we can see this broader set of beliefs about what is and is not feminine for black and white women at work today; layered under the additional barriers of poverty, safety, and access to green space or infrastructure in black and brown communities. In Detroit, in particular, women of color face the compounding issues of reverse commutes, and the unenviable chore of getting children to the best schools they can even when those schools are far from where they live and work.



And I have not even touched on the depth of these issues for people who are black and queer.

This is why white cyclofeminists need to step up: because we are not the most vulnerable road users, and we are not (collectively) doing enough to advocate for the policies that protect those who are. Let’s take some action against the long history of white women out for themselves, lets stand with our sisters (and not just our cisters). Our identities off the bike are fundamentally tied to our ability to ride at all.