"The Bicycle Girls and the Costumes They Will Wear"
How the bicycle changed women's clothing
Thanks for reading! To support my work, please click the button below:
If you want to help keep this project going, please consider purchasing a paid subscription. Paid subscribers — it’s only about 75 cents a week! — get access to the archives, the satisfaction of supporting work they enjoy, and my undying gratitude.
There’s a little mention of her in the New York Times, right under some other very 1890s article titles (“To Fight ‘Boss’ Fergueson: Independent Democrats and Republicans Unite in New-Utrecht” and “Chinamen Notified to Register”). The article' doesn’t even name her, but it does name her male rival, Paul Jones.
The little piece is titled “A Woman to Rival Paul Jones.” Jones, identified as the “globe trotter,” was apparently famous for trying to travel around the world in a year “without any money” — but he failed, having borrowed $50 from a “J.F. McDonald of Pawtucket.” Now, the Times marveled, a woman was going to try to attempt something similar. The unnamed woman, “the wife of a Boston business man,” would “start our penniless, with simply the clothing she has on, and a part of the plan is to travel through cities on a bicycle and in bicycle costume.” She was doing it as “the result of a wager of $10,000.”
The story went like this: two rich Boston men had been arguing about women’s abilities. One of them thought that women were just as capable as men, while the other guy was more chauvinistic. They shook on a bet: if a woman could cycle around the world, earning $5,000 by the end of the journey, the chauvinist would pay up.
The New York Times didn’t bother to name this woman, but we know who she was: Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a Latvian immigrant and mother of three. For reasons that are probably obvious, she marketed herself under a different name: Annie Londonderry.
She seems like the sort of person who would have been an excellent internet influencer. She was a hustler, gathering sponsorships for her trip (her nom de bike came from one of her sponsors, the Londonderry Spring Water Company, which affixed an ad to her bike).
She was also an excellent self-mythologizer (it seems there was no $10,000 bet; she made it up to attract attention for her trip). And she was fearless (she had never used a bike before when she announced her intention to ride around the world).
So, in the summer of 1894, she set out from Boston on a 42-pound bike, headed toward New York and then Chicago. She made it to Chicago, but just barely — she’d lost 20 pounds from her 5’ 3” frame and realized she was never going to make it across the continent. So she switched to a much lighter men’s bike, changing her attire, as well (you couldn’t ride a men’s bike in a dress). Here’s an illustration of her controversial outfit from the St. Paul Globe:
In the end, she abandoned her effort to ride west, instead heading back to the east coast and sailing to France. In France, she met with more resistance —journalists there thought she was too masculine, and customs took her bike for a while. So she decided to alter her plans. Rather than bike around the world, she would travel around the world and bike a bit in each destination. She took a ship from France to Egypt, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Japan, and then San Francisco, riding the bike in each place to the delight of onlookers and the press.
She sold merchandise and told exaggerated tales of her exploits. The press ate it up — here’s a headline from the Washington Evening Times that gives a flavor of the press coverage:
Eventually, Londonderry made it back to Boston, claiming not only to have cycled around the world but to have somehow unmasked a notorious Massachusetts “Wild Man,” who had been terrorizing people in rural areas of the state. Her account of the events, published under the name “Nellie Bly Jr.” (a reference to another world traveler), sound suspiciously like the plot of a Scooby Doo episode.
After she returned to Boston, Annie Kopchovsky — now presumably going by her married name again — seems to have assumed a relatively normal life. She had another child and mostly worked with her husband in his garment business. She didn’t really ride bikes much for the rest of her life.
Under the “Nervy Miss Londonderry” article above, the Evening Times saw fit to publish this cartoon:
The joke is a pretty obvious one — “lady cyclists” were not particularly ladylike. As we’ll see next week, there was a lot of skepticism around women riding bikes, but I want to focus on the subtext of the cartoon: how the bicycle changed women’s clothing.
The first bicycles were the so-called penny-farthings — the impractical-looking ones with the big front wheels:
Women didn’t ride them much, and when they did, it was considered a novelty. Women on bikes were unusual enough that one cigarette company issued a series of little cards featuring “girl cyclists:"
Some of the images were even a little salacious (by 1880s standards). This one is from the “Pretty Athletes” series:
It wasn’t considered respectable for women to ride the penny-farthings. Instead, proper ladies rode tricycles that allowed them to wear the complicated long dresses fashionable at the time:
But, with the invention of the “safety bicycle” — especially the women’s version with a lower bar that could accommodate their skirts and a guard to keep their fabric from catching in the chain — women could take to two wheels:
The earliest biking fashions for women adapted outfits designed for horseback riding, which still allowed maximum coverage of the woman’s body. Many outfits even concealed a woman’s feet from the prying eyes of the public:
As cycling took off among women, however, manufacturers started to make clothing for women that allowed more movement. Some designers started selling “split skirts” that allowed women to move their legs independently while still looking as if they were wearing a modest skirt:
This example was made of heavy wool:
Others wore special biking skirts that could be hitched up when in the saddle.
Or had clever convertible outfits:
Cycling clothes was a matter of great interest — the image above is from an article in the Wheeling Register with a pretty typical title for this kind of piece, indicating the writer’s incredulity at this boundary-threatening trend (I also love that the Wheeling, West Virginia paper has a “Special New York Fashion Correspondent”):
Over time, cycling clothes pushed even more boundaries. Some women wore short skirts:
Or daringly got rid of the skirts altogether, as the Los Angeles Herald revealed in an article titled:
The author told his readers all about the latest trend sweeping Europe:
That’s right, women in pants! As this Puck cartoon said, the bike was the “great dress reformer of the nineteenth century!”
Women who biked began to ditch other aspects of Victorian fashion, as well — they got looser corsets, or removed their corsets altogether, so they could breathe more easily.
The new fashion was seen as part of a new womanhood:
Eventually, new cycling clothes helped to inspire the “rational dress” movement, based on the idea that women’s clothing should be practically designed for the realities of life. Women began to wear bicycle clothing out of the saddle, as this cartoon indicates.
The new womanhood didn’t eliminate all of the strictures on female appearances. One unnamed female cyclist complained:
One perspires so horribly, and after half an hour’s ride one gets into a dreadful state. I always take a little powder-box and a pair of tongs and a spirit lamp to curl my fringe, but it is very difficult to use them when there are gentleman present, for that makes such a fuss, and they might laugh at one.
And there were certainly efforts to dissuade women from venturing too far away from fashion norms — some women were arrested for appearing in public in bloomers, while fashion editors tried more subtle methods of pressure:
The bicycle was an important factor in the changing women’s fashion of the late 1800s. The sheer impracticality of riding a bike in full Victorian middle-class dress led to more practical clothing and began the long decline of constricting garments like the corset.
But this was only one of the ways in which the bicycle changed women’s lives. Next week, we’ll look at even more consequential effects of two-wheeled transportation. The bicycle didn’t just change how people dressed — it became a vehicle for women’s liberation. See you then!
This newsletter is free to all, but I count on the kindness of readers to keep it going. If you enjoyed reading this week’s edition, there are two ways to support my work:
You can subscribe as a free or paying member:
Or you can share the newsletter with others:
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!
George, Once again you have made history come alive. The illustrations are so interesting. My mother was born in 1922 and she was a tomboy. She wanted to get a bike but her mom thought the bicycle was too dangerous. She offered my mom a dog if she gave up the idea of a bicycle. When I was young my mom rode a bike. When she was in her 50-60s she and my dad and friends rode their bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge many times. So she got the best of both worlds. She enjoyed bike riding and got a family pet named Rex.