1890s Women’s Bicycle Racing: Forgotten, but Why?

Abstract

This article discusses six factors that have contributed to what Clare S. Simpson called the “paucity of primary and secondary sources” related to women’s bicycle racing of the 1890s: efforts by the League of American Wheelman to suppress the sport, and the resulting lack of statistical compilations of the women’s accomplishments; the East Coast bias that prevailed then and through the twentieth century; the prominence of local, as opposed to national, sports coverage in the 1890s; the difficulty of accessing contemporary newspaper accounts of the women’s races; the brevity of the era itself, which lasted only a few years; and good old-fashioned gender bias. Fortunately, with the recent burst of publications about nineteenth century women’s racing, we can now look forward to a more balanced representation of bicycle racing history.