Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women (original) (raw)
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Women face an uphill battle in cycling—in more ways than one. In addition to having less lean muscle mass and a higher percentage of body fat than men, women have had to contend with long-standing social barriers that discourage them from becoming athletes. Problems of access and funding for women’s sports, social pressure not to be physically active, and lack of role models are just a few of the many issues that keep girls and women from sports participation in greater numbers. One Victorian writer described cycling as “an indolent and indecent practice that could even transport girls to prostitution.” i One wonders if he was worried that a bike would get them there faster than walking. In fact, the bicycle played an important role in the women’s liberation movement, providing means of independent movement, introducing less restrictive clothing, and even influencing bike design. However, there is no doubt that many women are joining the ranks of recreational, commuter, and competitive cyclists. With all of this change, a couple of questions come to mind: how does this influx of women on wheels affect cycling—as a sport, as a pastime, as a way of life? And, how does cycling change the ways that women think about themselves—as athletes, teammates, club members, authorities, and even as women?
Cycling: Image and Imaginary in the Cultural Turn: Review Essay
Transfers, 2012
The mechanized mobility practices that came to dominate road use in the twentieth century—using cars, motorbikes, and bicycles—have been notable for the concurrent development of accompanying print literatures in the form of magazines and newspapers. The developmental history of each mode can be told through a number of distinct lenses, each revealing a part of the story of the mobility technology in use. In the context of a renaissance in cycling, there is an emergence of a new style of bicycle magazine that breaks the mould of previous journals.
Bicycling through the life course: the start-stop-start experiences of women cycling
The paper 'Women Cycling through the lifecourse' provides an alternative analysis of the material discussed in this article. Growing interest in the bicycle as a sustainable form of transport has helped to foreground questions of gender and mobility. In English speaking countries such as Australia, women’s lower rates of cycling have been well documented. Barriers to cycling identified by both men and women are likely to impact particularly heavily upon women given their on-going, significant domestic and carer responsibilities. However, intra-urban differences in rates of women cycling suggest an inter-play between spatial context and lifecycle stage that influences women’s participation in cycling. This paper reports on a qualitative study into Australian women’s experiences of cycling through the life course and focuses on the circumstances in which they take up or give up cycling and the spatial contexts in which this occurs. Forty nine women participated in the study. The study found that all respondents learned to cycle between the ages of 5 and 12 and most stopped in the early years of secondary school. Almost two thirds of the respondents had returned to cycling several times through the life course. Women took up or gave up cycling through a conjunction of circumstances but women in their early 20s emphasised the importance of social relationships in taking up cycling and women in their late 30s (and older) focused on health and fitness. Becoming mothers or grandmothers was given as a reason for starting, but also for stopping cycling. Moving house, changing jobs or changes in personal relationships also led to changes in cycling. As a small scale study, the findings of the research are limited but it does suggest productive new ways of thinking about and researching everyday mobility. Rather than assuming a linear view of everyday mobility – i.e. that people tend to walk/cycle as children then catch public transport/drive as adults – this study suggests that women are quite open to incorporating bicycling for transport (mixed with other purposes) into their lives at different times according to their circumstances.
Writing the bicycle: women, rhetoric, and technology in late nineteenth-century America
2009
Writing the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Under the direction of Jane Danielewicz and Jordynn Jack) This project examines the intersections among rhetoric, gender, and technology, examining in particular the ways that American women appropriated the new technology of the bicycle at the turn of the twentieth century. It asks: how are technologies shaped by discourse that emanates both from within and beyond professional boundaries? In what ways do technologies, in turn, reshape the social networks in which they emerge-making available new arguments and rendering others less persuasive? And to what extent are these arguments furthered by the changed conditions of embodiment and materiality that new technologies often initiate? Writing the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric and Technology in Late Nineteenth-Century America addresses these questions by considering how women's interactions with the bicycle allowed them to make new claims about their minds and bodies, and transformed the gender order in the process. The introduction, "Rhetoric, Gender, Technology," provides an overview of the three broad conversations to which the project primarily contributes: science and technology studies, feminist historiography, and rhetorical theory. In addition, it outlines a "techno-feminist" materialist methodology that emphasizes the material iii and rhetorical agency of users in shaping technologies beyond their initial design and distribution phases. The second chapter, "Technology and the Rhetoric of Bicycle Design," describes the context in which the bicycle craze emerged and explains how the popular "safety" model responded to users' concerns about its predecessor, the high wheeled "ordinary" bicycle. The third chapter, "Popular Magazines and the Rise of the Woman Bicyclist," offers a glimpse at a genre that generated both wider acceptance of the new technology and specific prescriptions as to how it might be useful to women. Finally, the fourth and fifth chapters-titled, respectively, "Bicycling and the Invention of Women's Athletic Dress" and "The Medical Bicycle"-examine two discourses that shaped the women's bicycling phenomenon, both rhetorically and materially, and that were in turn transformed by this phenomenon: the heated issues of women's dress reform and women's health.
Bike Babes in Boyland: women cyclists' pedagogical strategies in urban bicycle culture
Where are the women?" is one of the most common questions asked by those dedicated to expanding the number of cyclists on the road. Some common answers are: women do not like to ride on busy streets, are concerned with their appearance, do not feel strong enough to commute on a bicycle, and are faced with societal norms about their place in the private sphere that conflict with the independence of the bicycle. In this action note, I look at a group of women cyclists who are using various techniques that encourage women to ride bicycles and become part of a cycling community. This action note describes the Pedal Pusher Society (PPS). The group is located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but its strategies would be helpful in many contexts. Readers who are not involved in bicycle advocacy should benefit from learning about the group's pedagogy by focusing on how they attempt to create a new space for women to enter the cycling community. I argue that activists need to recognize the inherent exclusionary environment in many social movements and must work to craft new spaces that directly address the reasons why particular groups of people are attracted to social movements.
Beyond the bicycle: Seeing the context of the gender gap in cycling
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