Read this, imagine it, and try to stop your heart from racing with excitement:
In a six-day race in Chicago in 1896, Tillie and Dottie were bike by bike to the last laps, until Tillie pulled ahead by one-seventeenth of a mile in the home stretch, receiving a “boisterous” ovation. In a six-day race in 1897, Tillie had to spurt for the entire last hour to keep just ahead of Dottie as well as Helen Baldwin. All three had 264 miles and 14 laps and Tillie cycled full-speed and flat out to nose ahead the other two just at the finish.
But some men had a problem with the ladies racing. It was “visually displeasing” and “morally questionable.” Streeter writes about a former racer who lead the rules department of the League of American Wheelman (LAW). He believed that lady racing ruined the reputation of male cycling—after all, if ladies did it, how impressive could it be? So he urged LAW to “blacklist” the velodromes that supported women’s races. Cyclist Margaret Gast participated in “century” rides and rode for thousands and thousands of miles. And then men deemed it “improper, immoral, and illegal to make such an exhibition on the public highways” and banned “continuous century performances” by women.
[The showrunner in me is SCREAMING for a movie about the lady cyclists of the 1890s, done in the style of A League of their Own.]
But still, women raced whenever and however they could. The women who did so were not “ladies of the leisure class”. Most were lower class women who used “their athleticism to survive and develop physically and financially.” With the LAW blacklists, it became harder for them to make a living from racing. It became harder to do, harder to watch.
When we talk about the history of women in cycling, the name Annie Londonderry often comes up first. She embarked on a solo bike round around the world—and mostly managed it. (Turns out she was a young mom of three and look what moms have to do to get a little alone time, sheesh!). Annie Londonderry is often “the one” we talk about when we talk about historical women cycling. And good for her—she deserves it! What a feat of strength and marketing. But Annie, as a lone stunt woman, is an example of “woman-washing”— finding one lone woman to celebrate for her daring, especially if her achievement doesn’t disrupt our understanding of the status quo.
Annie and her solo ride doesn’t disrupt our understanding of women in sports in the same way that the fact of thousands of people turned out to watch women’s cycling races in the 1890s does.
When we talk about the history of women in cycling, we talk about what she was wearing. The real story, I think, is that there was a vibrant burgeoning sport of women cycling and men purposely quashed it.