In the 1890s, bicycling mania rolled across the country and into San Francisco. No one in town could talk about anything else.

So many bicyclists took to the city’s streets and parks that the carriage-hire trade was severely damaged. Piano sales dropped as bicycling cut into leisure-time activities like playing and listening to music.

In Golden Gate Park, horse riders and bicyclists quarreled over who had the right of way. A women’s bicycling club called the Falcons opened a clubhouse in the wondrous sand-dune colony soon to be known as Carville. In 1896, the year the bike craze peaked, an estimated 5,000 “wheelmen” and women held a great Bicycle Protest, riding down Market Street to demand better roads before a cheering crowd of 100,000.

The craze began when bikes of modern design replaced the dangerous old-fashioned ones with enormous front wheels. Bicycling mania was short-lived, but it was more than just a fad — it had a major social impact.

In “When Bikehood Was in Flower,” Irving Leonard wrote that cycling in the 1890s was “a general intoxication, an eruption of exuberance like a seismic tremor that shook the economic and social foundations of society and rattled the windows of its moral outlook.”

That seismic tremor had an especially powerful effect on American women, as many as 2 million of whom rode bicycles in the 1890s. For “the gentler sex,” who had been literally and figuratively corseted by Victorian codes of dress and conduct, bicycling offered liberation, independence, physicality and sheer fun. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said bicycling was doing “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

Not surprisingly, this new female freedom produced a backlash. Particularly troubling to some men was the advent of bloomers, billowing pants that allowed women to ride more comfortably than long skirts. In Norwich, N.Y., a group of young men vowed not to associate with women who wore bloomers and tried unsuccessfully to organize their movement into a “national anti-bloomer brigade.”

In Chicago, entrepreneurs trying to cash in on the craze held dances where both men and women were required to wear cycling clothes. The city threw a wrench in the spokes, passing an ordinance decreeing that “any woman who would wear bloomers while dancing in public was to be treated as a common prostitute.”

Traditionalists argued that cycling would lead young women into fast living and eventual doom. In an 1896 magazine piece titled, “Crusade against the wheel for women,” the author wrote, “Bicycling by young women has helped more than any other medium to swell the ranks of reckless girls, who finally drift into the army of outcast women of the United States.”

Lurking behind such sentiments was a fear of unleashed female sexuality. This was manifested, among other ways, in the concern that riding a bicycle would sexually stimulate women. To reduce this grave danger, “hygienic” saddles without padding were introduced. High stems and handlebars were also deemed advisable to prevent women cyclists from becoming sexually aroused.

Trivia time The previous trivia question: What famous architect redesigned the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel? Answer: Julia Morgan. Morgan, also an engineer, was hired to work on the hotel after the 1906 earthquake and fire because of her innovative use of reinforced concrete. This week’s trivia question: What San Francisco institution was created after Hull House founder Jane Addams visited the city in 1894? Editor’s note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday. Dig deep into Chronicle Vault Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Chronicle Vault newsletter and get classic archive stories in your inbox twice a week. Read hundreds of historical stories, see thousands of archive photos and sort through 153 years of classic Chronicle front pages at SFChronicle.com/vault.

Read More

San Franciscans passionately debated the pros and cons of female bicyclists, discussing everything from sexuality to gender roles to class. In “The Making of Golden Gate Park: The Early Years 1895-1906,” Raymond Clary notes that “as the sport grew in popularity, rich men were heard to grumble that one could not tell a rich man’s daughter from a ‘typewriter,’ or office girl.” The luxury jeweler Tiffany’s soon rectified this situation, announcing a line of outrageously expensive bicycles decorated with gold and silver.

To judge by a poem titled, “The Bicycle Girl,” published in 1895 in the Examiner, the sight of hundreds of confident, independent women breezily whizzing by seems to have caused some male San Franciscans to suffer something of a psycho-sexual meltdown.

“The Bicycle Girl, oh, the Bicycle Girl / With a spinnaker skirt and a sleeve like a furl; / Such a freak on the wheel, such a sight on the tire / I am certain I never will love or admire,” the author begins smoothly enough. But he quickly spins off the emotional road and crashes: “The sound of her bell and the hum of her wheel / Is enough to make any man’s cranium reel ... And why did she smile as she lightly spun by? ... The Bicycle Girl, oh, the Bicycle Girl, / She has tangled my heart in her mystical whirl.”

The city’s prevailing attitude seems to have been expressed by an editorial titled, “Women bicycle riders,” that ran in the Call in July 1896. The piece took on a Washington, D.C., organization called the Women’s Rescue League, whose position, the Call wrote, was that “immorality is alarmingly on the increase among American women, and all because of the horrid bicycle.”

The editorial acknowledged that some modern women did wear clothing that might be seen as immodest, but concluded, “These are not the days of the Mayflower, but there are just as many good and true women now as there were in those days. The members of the Rescue League might better attend to rescuing their own minds from the many unfounded suspicions which appear to keep them in a state of agitation.”

The extent of bicycling mania can be gauged by the cartoon and joke page of The Chronicle’s Sept. 27, 1896, edition, which featured no fewer than 11 jokes and two cartoons about bicycling. The lead cartoon depicts a skinny, unattractive older woman in a long skirt looking disdainfully at a beautiful young woman riding a bike in bloomers. The caption reads: “Skinner: I wouldn’t wear bloomers like that for anything. Goodform: I wouldn’t, either, if I were you.”

The great bicycling craze of the 1890s died almost as quickly as it was born, killed by the arrival of the automobile in the early 20th century. But for millions of women in San Francisco and across the country, their experience on two wheels was part of a longer ride to liberation, one from which there would be no turning back.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com