A Ride Through International Women’s Day

 Today is International Women’s Day.

As I’ve mentioned on other posts, Susan B.Anthony—who didn’t live to exercise a right for which she fought—understood what an effective vehicle, if you will, on the long road to equality:

“I think the bicycle has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride byon a bicycle.”

She is right in more ways than one. Bicycles themselves gave women mobility they didn’t have before.  But, just as important, it loosened women’s dress standards:  Bloomers, shorter and split skirts and the elimination of corsets were among the sartorial shifts bicycles ushered. 

Having greater freedom of movement allowed women to move more freely and perform a greater variety of jobs. I can’t help but to think it was an important step in women seeing our bodies, and ourselves, on their and our own terms rather than in the physical and ideological constraints imposed by men. I can understand, a little, how exhilarating that could feel: I think I felt something like it when I realized I could live as a woman on my terms.

And bicycling has been an important part of that journey.  When all is said and done, though I ride, not only in the spirit of Ms. Anthony, but also of Cyndi Lauper:

 Girls just wanna have fun.  Really, what better reason is there to ride?

Oh—speaking of clothing: Sophie Germain’s parents took hers away.  Why?  Because she was teaching herself mathematics, which was not “proper” for a young lady. When that didn’t work, they returned her vestments and let her go to school.

She would make important contributions to mathematics—including work in something called Elasticity Theory, which has proved invaluable to engineers—including one Gustavo Eiffel.

I learned about her when I found myself on a street named for her (rue Sophie Germain) as I cycled south from—you guessed it—the Eiffel Tower.  And, being the curious person I am, I looked her up.

So You Didn't Marry The Girl Or Guy Next Door? Thank Your Bike!

If the love of your life is of a different race, ethnicity, national origin from your own, you have the bicycle to thank.  I might say the same if your significant other is the same gender as you, or identifies in a way you never heard of until you left home.

That's more or less what University of Arizona historian David Ortiz says.  As I've mentioned in several posts, no less than Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more than anything to emancipate women.  Cycling would change the clothing women wore, allowing more freedom of movement.  The bicycle also allowed women to travel unchaperoned by males for the first time.

And, says Ortiz, it also allowed men to travel greater distances.  At the time the "safety" bicycle was introduced, most people never got further than about 50 kilometers from where they were born or raised.  For a young man, then, "the girl next door" wasn't a Hollywood stereotype (well, ok, Hollywood didn't exist then): If she wasn't the one he married, she didn't come from much further afield.

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with marrying the girl (or guy) next door, if that is what you want.  I just think it's nice to know that it's not the only choice.  And, of course, having two parents of very different backgrounds can be a great thing for their kids:  What could give them a better education?

As a transgender woman, I can't help but to think that such heterogeneity, along with women's liberation, helped to bring about, however slowly, greater acceptance of LGBTQ people. It's no coincidence, really, that the first and most vibrant queer communities have been found in cosmopolitan neighborhoods and cities.

So, if I ever find myself hooking up with an Afro-Japanese Brazilian bisexual whose pronoun is "they", I know the bicycle is responsible!  

Seriously, though:  From what David Ortiz says, the bicycle made us freer.  Certainly, I feel freer when I ride!

200 Years Of Bicycling In New York

It looks like I'll be taking a trip to the Museum of the City New York soon.

If you read this blog regularly, you know I'm not the sort of person who has to be dragged into a museum.  But even if you are that sort of person, and you happen to be in New York, you might want to take a trip to the MCNY.

Bicyclists in Central Park in 1941

There, "Cycling in the City:  A 200-Year History" will include photographs and other objects intended to "trace the bike's transformation of urban transportation and leisure" and reveal "the complex, creative and often contentious (No, really?--ed.) relationship between New York and the bicycle."  This exhibition has been organized by Evan Friss, the author of On Bicycles:  A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City and Donald Albrecht, one of the museum's curators.  

At least one of the topics covered by the exhibit is something I've discussed in at least a few of my posts:  the bicycle's role in liberating women.  The way we dress today owes everything to the shorter and split skirts, and "bloomers" developed for female riders, as well as those female riders tossing off their hoopskirts, petticoats and whalebone corsets. 

This photograph, taken by renowned photographer Alice Austen, shows her friend Violet Ward on the right with Daisy Elliott.  Ms. Ward, who lived on Staten Island, started one of the first bike clubs for women and wrote Bicycling for Ladies, a 200-page book advising women on how to become serious cyclists.

Another interesting topic the exhibit highlights is the ways in which bicycles and bicycling helped different ethnic and racial groups, some of whom had only recently arrived in the city, to assert their American identity as well as to promote solidarity.  German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican and Mongolian created their own riding groups.  So did Caribbean immigrants, as well as African-Americans, most of whom came from the South.  Black cyclists started the Alpha Wheelmen to challenge the notion that cycling was only for privileged white men (We sure can use that now!) and a certain black man rode with the South Brooklyn Wheelmen into worldwide fame as the second black athlete to win a title in any sport. (Canadian boxer George Dixon was the first.)  He was none other than Marshall, a.k.a. Major, Taylor.

A bicycle club member in the Bronx, 2007. Photo Carlos Alvarez Montero

Now, being a white cyclist, I'm not aware of current New York City-based bike clubs organized around the ethnic or racial identities, though their existence wouldn't surprise me:  I often see groups of black or Latino men (and, less frequently, women) riding together, sometimes dressed in the same colors. They might be actual clubs, or less formal organizations. And there is at least one women's cycling group that I know about:  WE Bicycle.

Steve Athineos, center, leads NYC bike messengers in protest against midtown bike lane closure, 1987

And, about the "contentious" part of the museum's introduction:  The exhibit shows that conflict between cyclists and the police or segments of the public are not new.  One reason why we had to fight to get Prospect and Central Parks closed to traffic is that bicycles had actually been banned from those parks, and others, during the first "bike boom" because of confrontations between cyclists and pedestrians as well as horseback riders.  Now, how anyone thought that vehicular traffic was less of a hazard than bicycles is beyond me.  Then again, I don't claim to have one of the great minds of this, or any other, era.

OK, I'll turn off the sarcasm meter and repeat that I intend to see the exhibit. 

Her Spirit Lives On--In Saudi Arabia

I know I've mentioned it a number of times, but I never get tired of repeating it.  I'm talking about something Susan B. Anthony said--namely, that the bicycle has done more than anything else to liberate women.

More than a century after she made that observation, it has shown itself to be true, again, in a number of countries--even in one of the nations that has long been one of the most oppressive for women.

I am talking about Saudi Arabia.  For decades, women haven't been allowed to do much of anything without the approval of some male relative.  If they wanted to open a bank account, they had to have a husband's, father's or brother's signature.  If they wanted to travel abroad, they could do so only in the company of a related man.  Police officers were deployed to enforce bans on females mixing with unrelated males in public venues.

Some public venues, such as cinemas, didn't exist at all.

Some things women weren't allowed to do at all, such as driving--and riding a bicycle.

All of this was aided and abetted by the US taxpayer, which propped up the repressive House Of Saud in exchange for allowing the US to build military bases in the kingdom--and, yes, cheap petrol.

But since this is not a blog about foreign policy, I want to concentrate on a change that's brewing, however slowly, in the land of the hajj.  It is embodied in, among other women, Amirah al-Turkistani.  

Amirah al-Turkistani on her bicycle

After earning her graduate degree in 2015, she left Boston and returned to her home country.  She brought her pistachio-colored bicycle back with her.  Friends mocked her.  "What are you going to do, hang it on the wall?" one taunted her.

Now she is riding her beloved machine all over Jeddah, the Red Sea town where she lives with her husband and kids.  She has inspired other women to do the same and one can't help but to think that women like them are inspiring, if not pressuring, 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to ease some social restrictions.  They include the ban on women driving, which will end this summer.

Al-Turkistani says she plans to drive, not because she really wants to drive, but to show solidarity with other women who are enjoying newfound liberties.  Also, it will greatly help her in her work as a freelance designer and college lecturer.  Still, she says, she plans to continue cycling.

Women Cycling For The Environment--In India

Teaching a Women's Studies course during the past semester got me to thinking about the ways in which feminism--however you define it--is tinged with some of the cultural biases feminists have tried to fight.  I have to admit that I brought some of those attitudes and assumptions into my own thinking about gender equality and the ways in which I define myself as a feminist.

I noticed at least one of those unconscious biases while reading one of the best-researched, and most impassioned, papers I read this semester. It was, among other things, an argument that a universal single-payer health care system is the only kind that can help to erase some of the inequalities between men's and women's health care.

The student who wrote the paper hails from Burkina Faso and came to class in a hijab. She expressed her belief that there was nothing incompatible between her religion, Islam, and her wish to bring about gender equality. Another student, who made a slide-show about female infanticide in her native country (Pakistan) as well as other countries like China, expressed a similar belief.

I have to admit that sometimes I still think that the most forward-thinking people when it comes to women's rights are in secular Western democracies. And I admit that I prefer, and probably always will prefer, living in one.

But I must say that some of the most interesting things--including bike rides--undertaken by women have been, lately, in countries where we are supposedly more "oppressed."  One such nation is India.  Now, know some very strong, intelligent and independent Indian women.  And they are some of the most educated women to be found anywhere.  Still, I rarely see one on a bicycle, at least here in New York, or the United States.

That is why I was so impressed to read about a group of 13 cyclists, 10 of whom are women, on a ride through western India.  They left Pune last week and plan ton cover 1500 kilometers (about 1000 miles) in 16 days before they end up in Kanniyakumari on 3 January.  Along the way, they will pass through a number of cities containing some of the most sacred Hindu and other religious monuments, as well as any number of World Heritage sites--not to mention some beautiful mountain, river and sea coast vistas.

Cyclists in Pune, just before they embarked on their ride.

They are riding, in part, to bring attention to some of those natural and man-made wonders.  Why?  Well, India is one of the world's fastest-growing economies:  According to a report I heard this morning on BBC World News, India will leapfrog England and France (ironically, the countries that colonized it) to become the world's fifth-largest economy in 2018.  All of that development means more motorized traffic, cell towers, factories and mines--which mean, of course, more pollution.  Indian cities have some of the world's worst air quality, and, since wind does not stop at a city line, the smog and other pollution are spreading and threatening some of the world's most awe-inspiring sights, not to mention the health of humans and other living beings.

One of the things I learned in the research I did for the class is that in India and other developing countries, women are leading, or at least are giving much of the momentum, to environmental movements.  Of course, part of my own cultural arrogance led me to believe that such nations "don't care about the environment", seduced as they are by their newly-created wealth.  In addition to being disabused of such notions, I have learned that concern for the environment has been spurred, in India, China and other places, by feminists.  They see--to a degree that almost no one, male or female, in the Western world can--that environmental issues are women's issues. And children's issues.  And that men will be better off if women and children are.

And the bicycle is, if you will, a vehicle for delivering such equality--just as Susan B. Anthony said it was more than a century ago.

Good Thing They Didn't Call It The "Jockbra"

In several posts on this blog, I've mentioned that Susan B. Anthony said, in essence, that the bicycle has done more than anything else to liberate women.

Since women started riding bikes, there are probably two things that have done more than anything else to encourage girls' and womens' participation in cycling and other sports.

One is Title IX, the 1972 US law that prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs--which include school-based sports programs.  Since then, the number of girls' and womens' sports teams in colleges and schools has expanded greatly.  As a result, more girls were encouraged to participate in sports, whether in their schools or outside of it, and one could argue that the subsequent increase in the proficiency of American female athletes has spurred other countries to improve their women's sports programs.

The other is what we now call the sports bra.  Before it was created, girls and women--if they weren't flat-chested--had to live with the pain of their breasts bouncing or the chafing of a bra's wires and straps.  Or they improvised support from duct tape and other items.  Or they simply didn't participate in sports at all.

The last option simply wasn't an option for Hinda Miller.  She had just started working for the theatre department at the University of Vermont and taken up jogging.  She used two bras which, I imagine, restricted her breathing and was probably only somewhat less painful than bouncing breasts.  

Across campus, Lisa Lindahl was dealing with the same problem.  She and Miller reached out to Polly Smith, who made costumes for the university's theatre department.  They bought some bras and tore them apart. "I was taking notes; Lisa was running," Miller remembers.  She was always asking Lindahl, "Does that feel good?"

None of them did.  They tried to come up with a solution when Lindahl's then-husband came downstairs with two jockstraps slung over his shoulders.  He was teasing them, but the proverbial light bulb lit up in Miller's head:  "That's what we want to do," she remembers thinking.  "We want to pull everything closer to the body."

She ran to the store, bought two jockstraps and brought them to the costume shop.  "The waist band became our rib band," she explained.  "We crossed the straps in the back because we didn't want them to fall and it went over our head.  And that was it."

So was the Jogbra born, 40 years ago this month.  It became a national brand and, two decades later, Brandi Chastain cemented its place in our collective consciousness.

Hinda Miller with a bronze plaque commemorating the Jogbra at the University of Vermont.

Today, Lindahl is an artist based in Charleston, South Carolina.  Miller served as a State Senator in Vermont from 2002-2013 and ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Burlington (Bernie Sanders' old job) in 2006.  These days, she serves on the boards of a number of organizations as diverse as the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and the Vermont Youth Orchestra.

If I do say so myself, few people in this world can appreciate the story of the Jogbra's origin as much as I can.  After all, I am a cyclist and someone who's participated in other sports--and someone who's lived on both sides of the aisle, if you will.  In other words, I am a transgender woman and one of (I assume) very few people who has used both a jockstrap and a sports bra!

Para Esas Mujeres, Una Opportunidad Fantastica

More than 120 years ago, Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle has done more than anything else in the world to emancipate women.  She certainly had a point:  Cycling itself gave women freedom and mobility we hadn't previously experienced.  It also led to less-restrictive clothing than women had previously worn which, of course, freed us in all sorts of other ways. I mean, I simply can't imagine living in a whalebone corset and petticoats.

Still, the bicycle's potential for emancipating women hasn't come close to being realized.  While I still wish that women's racing would get the attention it garnered, say, 30 to 35 years ago (in the days of Rebecca Twigg and Jeanne Longo), I think the real power of cycling for women lies elsewhere.

One example is in VeloCuba in Havana.  Three years ago, Nayvis Diaz left her job in the Ministry of Foreign Trade and sold her Peugeot car to finance the opening of this rental and repair shop.  All of its seven employees are women, including Dayli Carvo, who once raced for Cuba's national team. 

One of VeloCuba's employees works on a bike.

In addition to repairs and rentals, VeloCuba also conducts bicycle tours of the Cuban capital.  "We place great emphasis on knowing historical matters," Diaz says of her guides, who conduct tours in English, French and German as well as Spanish.  "We are very keen for our visitors to discover art, architecture, new places they can go at night, and learn about Cuban society," she explains.  

VeloCuba has, in its brief history, expanded to two locations--one in the central neighborhood of Vedado and the other in Old Havana.  It has not arrived at its success, however, without running through a couple of obstacles. 

One is something that even the expertise Diaz gained in her old job couldn't resolve:  how to get bicycles.  In spite of its relatively rich history of cycling, the island has no bike industry.  So, VeloCuba has had to buy bicycles from tourists visiting the island.  

The other is that for more than half a century, Cuba, like other Communist countries, had no advertising. Even today, there are few advertising venues. The shop's clientele, therefore, has been built mainly through word of mouth. At the risk of sounding sexist, I daresay that is something we, as women, rely on in so many areas of our lives.

In addition to bicycle rentals and repairs, VeloCuba repairs and maintains wheelchairs--for free.  Diaz sees it as a way to "offer some help to society."

The goodwill she is creating may help her to realize another dream she has:  that "one or two days a week, only cycling is allowed in the city."

I think Ms. Anthony would approve.

The New Bicycle Face?

If you have recently seen someone who is 

usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn, and the beginnings of shadows under the eyes, and always an expression of weariniess

you might have been looking at me last week, when I was grading mountains of papers and exams.  You also might have been looking at a White House Chief of Staff, or any number of people working in the current administration.

What causes the condition described above?  Some esteemed doctors have claimed it is a result of:

over-exertion, the upright position on the wheel and the unconscious attempt to maintain one's balance tend to produce a weary and exhausted face.

So...What was the name of this condition?, you ask.

Here goes:  Bicycle Face.

Believe it or not, sober, serious medical professionals actually claimed that riding would so distort your face--that is, if you are of the gender in which I now live.   They didn't say anything about what cycling does to men's faces.  Or, perhaps, it was OK for a man to look that way because it meant that he was exerting himself: something a woman was not supposed to do, or at least look as if she were doing.

That was back in 1895.  Of course, the doctors who came up with the description of the symptoms and causes of the disease, uh, over-relied on anecdotal evidence, made it all up.  Why?  They, and other reactionary men, were afraid that if women rode too much (or at all, according to some men), they would lose their physical attractiveness and other feminine virtues in much the same way they believed too much education (or simply reading) would becloud their pretty little heads.

By the time women got the right to vote in the US, I don't think anybody was using the term "bicycle face" any more.  Well, maybe some kid used it as a playground insult:  Perhaps he or she thought some other kid's face looked like it was laced with spokes or had ears that stuck out like handlebars or something.  Actually, I do recall hearing "bike face" in locker rooms:  The "bike" in question, of course, didn't have two wheels.

(Wow!  When I think of stuff like that, I realize how much the world--and I--have changed!)

Bicycle Face?

Anyway, we all know that some people take the sting out of epithets and derogatory terms by "owning" them.  I am thinking, of course, of the ways in which some African Americans (mostly the young) use the "n-word" or the way some in the LGBT community employ "queer" or gay men say "faggot".  I myself would never use those terms, but I understand why some would feel empowered by uttering them.  

Apparently, the owners of a new bicycle shop in Lexington, Kentucky are thinking like those young African-American and LGBT people.  They have appropriated the name of a fabricated "condition" or "syndrome" for their enterprise.  According to manager Jack Baugh, he and the owners want to make money.  But they also want to "create a sense of community" and make their shop "a place where people will want to come and get to know other cyclists."  That, he says, is one of the reasons why the repair shop has been placed in the center of the store, rather than in the bike, out the side or in a basement.  "That helps open things up for people to hang out, because the shop is where conversations always take place," he explains.

Bicycle Face will soon have a bar for coffee and other beverages--something offered by just one other bike shop in Lexington. It will also have free wi-fi and a big garage door to let in sunlight--and will be the site of maintenance classes as well as the starting point of group rides.

Baugh and the shop's owners realize that it's easy for cyclists to buy equipment online.  So, he says, Bicycle Face, has to be "more than a store."  It must be "an experience" that "gives customers a reason to come in."

And, one assumes, they want to make "bicycle face" an expression of joy.

How To Corrupt The Young: Let Their Teachers Ride Bikes To School

According to today's Google Doodle (Can you beat it as a source?), today is Teachers' Day.

As it happens, I teach in a college.  So, people often conflate me with teachers, especially when they complain about the inadequate skills and manners of young people today.   And they assume that I am on the same schedule as their local schools, or ask me questions about tests, programs and other things of which I am completely unfamilar.

 I am not ashamed to be associated with pedagogues in high schools, middle schools and elementary schools, and I feel the best of them are criminally underpaid.  Also, I feel they are unfairly blamed for much of what is "wrong" with "society".  There are bad ones, to be sure.  But the majority I've known are smart, hardworking people who are doing the best they can with limited resources, clueless or hostile administrators, mandates that have nothing to do with educating young people and with students who, perhaps, didn't get enough food, sleep or good parenting.

How educators influence young people can be debated, but their influence cannot be denied.  Thus, school boards have codes of conduct or behavior for their teachers.  Of course, what is considered "proper" or "moral" has changed over the past century.

For example, during the first Bike Boom of the 1890s. some feared that the sight of women on bicycles would corrupt young people.  There are folks (men, mainly) who still believe such things:  one of my colleagues, who hails from Ethiopia, has never ridden a bicycle because girls and females were kept away from them.  The reason, she said, is that the sight of a woman pumping her legs is seen as "provocative."

But, back in 1895, people didn't have to come from conservative religious societies in order to harbor such notions.  Although most of Long Island was still rural, it was hardly comparable to, say, Saudi Arabia.  Even so, in June of that year, the Long Island School Board issued a stern directive to its female teachers:  Stop Riding Bicycles.  As Board member William Sutter explained to the New York Sun:

   We as the trustees are responsible to the public for the conduct of the schools [and] the morals of the pupils.  I consider that for our boys and girls to see their women teachers ride up to the school door every day and dismount from a bicycle is conducive to the creation of immoral thoughts."

Hmm...Some of my students have seen me ride to school.  I wonder what "immoral thoughts" are fermenting in their heads.  Maybe I'm corrupting young people in ways I never realized!

In Motion On International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. 

As I've mentioned in other posts, early feminists saw the bicycle as a vehicle, if you will, of emancipation.  "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling," Susan B. Anthony intoned.  "I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."  She explained, "It has given women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance."

She would especially appreciate the images of Women In Motion posted on World Bicycle Relief's site. 

World Bicycle Relief is, in its own words, "mobilizing people through the power of bicycles."  In doing so, according to the organization's website, "We envision a world where distance is no longer a barrier to education, healthcare and economic opportunity."

To that end, WBR manufactures its own bicycles under the "Buffalo" brand in Africa, and has them assembled by mechanics in the locales in which the bicycles are distributed.  WBR trains those mechanics, as well as others who are involved in the production and distribution of those bicycles.  Recently, their wholly owned subsidiary, Buffalo Bicycles Ltd., has begun to sell bikes to non-governmental organizations, corporations and individuals in need of affordable, sustainable transportation.

Universe (yes, that's her name) uses her bicycle to bring the vegetables she grows and the foods she bakes to a market where she sells them.

WBR has work-to-own and study-to-own programs for those who cannot purchase a bicycle outright.  As you might imagine, those programs benefit women and girls particularly because--especially in areas like rural Africa--they have little or no money and limited (or, again, no) access to the networks that would help them get credit to start businesses or other resources needed to get paid employment, go to school or simply to take better care of their families--or themselves.

Kesia is a health-care volunteer who works with victims of HIV, sexually-transmitted diseases and gender-based violence. Because of the long distances she must travel, she used to meet only four clients a day.  Now, with her bicycle, she can meet as many as 75.

That WBR manufactures, assembles and distributes locally--and trains people to do so, as well as mechanics--is also a major benefit to women, who often can't travel very far from their farms, villages or families to obtain an education or employment, let alone a bike.  It also, naturally, makes it easier for women and girls to obtain bicycles, which in turn gives them the mobility that affords them access to a greater range of educational, business and other opportunities.

Georgina, a 68-year-old widow, uses her bicycle to carry milk from her farm to a collection center 12 km away.

No less than Barron's financial magazine has lauded F.K. Day, WBR's founder and president, as one the most effective philanthropists.  While WBR doesn't bill itself as dedicated exclusively, or even primarily, to women and girls, it's hard not to notice the particular impact their programs have on women and girls, especially those in the most difficult circumstances.

I am sure that, were she alive today, Ms. Anthony would point to the organization and its programs as one of the prime examples of what she meant, especially what she said about self-reliance.