The Bicycle Did More for Women in the 1890s Than Any Law Passed That Decade

In 1896 Susan B. Anthony told a reporter: "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." She was not being poetic. In the space of about five years a mass-produced machine did something no campaign had managed — it made it normal for a woman to leave the house alone, go somewhere specific, and come back, without arranging it with anybody.

What a woman could not do in 1885

The constraint was not only legal, it was physical and social at once. Respectable travel meant a chaperone or a carriage, both of which required somebody else's permission and somebody else's time. And the clothing was built to prevent exactly this: corsets that restricted the ribcage, and skirts with enough fabric to make a hill genuinely difficult.

Then the safety bicycle arrived — two equal wheels, a chain drive, pneumatic tyres — and by the early 1890s it was cheap enough for the middle class and sturdy enough for bad roads. It needed no horse, no stable, no driver and no permission.

The clothes had to change, and that was the fight

You cannot ride a bicycle in a corset and eight metres of skirt. This turned out to be the most contested part of the whole business, far more than the riding itself.

The Rational Dress Society, founded in London in 1881, had already been arguing that women's clothing should not damage the body — it campaigned against tight lacing and against the sheer weight of Victorian underskirts. Cycling gave the argument a practical, unanswerable form. Bloomers — full trousers gathered at the knee, named for the American campaigner Amelia Bloomer, who had promoted the style decades earlier — moved from ridicule to something a woman might actually be seen in.

The reaction was ferocious and revealing. Doctors produced warnings about cycling damaging women's health and morals. Newspapers ran cartoons. The intensity of it is the tell: the objection was never really about the bicycle.

Annie Londonderry, who was a better marketer than most brands

In June 1894 a 24-year-old Latvian immigrant and mother of three named Annie Cohen Kopchovsky wheeled a heavy bicycle onto a Boston street and announced she would ride around the world, apparently on a wager that no woman could. She took a sponsorship from Londonderry Lithia Spring Water, changed her riding name to Annie Londonderry, and carried advertising on herself and the bike.

She made it round in about fifteen months, swapped her skirts for a man's riding suit along the way, told journalists a stream of enthusiastic stories about her own exploits, and came home famous. Historians are still unpicking which parts were true. What is not in question is that a working-class mother of three rode a bicycle around the world in 1894 and turned herself into a brand doing it.

The posters got there first

This is where the design history joins up. The 1890s were also the years of the poster craze. Cheap colour lithography had matured, Paris was covered in Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec, and in the spring of 1893 Harper's magazine let a young art editor called Edward Penfield try a poster in the French style for its monthly issue.

It worked immediately, and Penfield went on producing a poster for each issue for around seven years. They were small — roughly 11 × 18 inches — because they were made for bookshop windows, and that size made them collectable. The craze got strange: people collected the posters more avidly than they read the magazines, publishers printed runs aimed at collectors, and the fad ran for about a decade before it collapsed.

Penfield's people are flat planes of colour, heavy outlines, no fuss. And the figure that keeps appearing in his work and in the poster art of the period is the New Woman: alone, outdoors, in motion, frequently on a bicycle, entirely uninterested in the viewer. It is worth remembering that this was advertising. The most commercially useful image in America in the mid-1890s was a woman going somewhere by herself.

The counter-argument was about how to sit

The instructive thing is what women were simultaneously being told. Conduct manuals across the nineteenth century devoted real space to posture — how a lady sits, how much room she takes, how to arrange herself so as to occupy as little as possible. The bicycle contradicted every line of it: you cannot ride one apologetically.

That argument did not end. It is why "sit like a lady" still works as a slogan on a wall in 2026 — the instruction is old enough to be absurd and recent enough that everyone recognises it.

What survived

The suffrage campaigns of the following decade inherited a public already used to the sight of women moving under their own power, and inherited the visual language too: flat colour, big type, a single figure, designed to be read from across a street.

If the period interests you, the vintage poster collection includes work in the Penfield idiom — the 1895 cycling print among them — and the feminist prints pick up the thread thirty years later. Both hang well together, which is not a coincidence: the second borrowed the grammar of the first.

Sources worth your time

The National Women's History Museum has a good piece on cycling and women's rights. Annie Londonderry's story is documented by Peter Zheutlin, her great-grandnephew, who has done the work of separating record from self-promotion. For Penfield, the Metropolitan Museum holds a large set of the Harper's posters and its catalogue entries are online. Wikipedia on Annie Londonderry, the Rational Dress Society and the New Woman is a reasonable entry point.

Written by The VORAROSA atelier — VORAROSA is an independent poster atelier. We design and curate 196 original art prints and produce each one on demand on 250gsm museum-quality matte paper.