Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women

Abstract

WHEN THE SAFETY BICYCLE IN THE I890S MADE BICYCLING ACCESsible to women, wheelwomen found themselves riding through contested terrain. The bicycle offered new mobility: new freedoms that both attracted feminists and other women and made it the target of conservative attack. Both defense and attack took medicalized form: antibicyclers claimed that riding would ruin women's sexual health by promoting masturbation and would compromise gender definition as well, while probicyclers asserted that bicycling would strengthen women's bodies-and thereby make them more fit for motherhood. Such claims are familiar from a period in which many discourses were medicalized and issues as diverse as shoplifting and women's education were tied to reproductive health.3 This article, however, focuses on the unfolding of these conflicts in the world of commerce as commercial interests negotiated with and within shifting ideas about women's bicycle riding. Specifically, I argue that the discourse of consumption constituted by the advertising, articles, and fiction within the developing mass-market magazine of the 1890s subsumed both feminist and