Happy International Women’s Day everyone. The campaign theme for this year is “Accelerate Action” which fits beautifully with the role the humble bike has had in forging change for women.
In a democratic country like mine, women take our freedoms for granted but it hasn’t always been so easy. We have our forebears to thank for much of what we enjoy. Strangely there are many parallels between Victorian society and the restrictions women have in countries in the Middle East and Africa today. And many great stories come from those countries about women riding bicycles as a way of expressing themselves.
In the 19th century in America and other Western nations, bicycles became emblematic of women’s bid for freedom. Riding a bike gave women new mobility and challenged Victorian restrictions on female behaviour. A woman on a bicycle no longer needed to depend on a man for transportation and could come and go as she pleased. Enthusiasm for cycling and women’s rights became so entwined that famed woman’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony famously said that “the bicycle has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”.
Frances Willard from Wisconsin in the US, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, published a book in…
