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Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women's Bicycle Racing
The 1890s was the peak of the American bicycle craze, and consumers, including women, were buying bicycles in large numbers. Despite critics who tried to discourage women from trying this new sport, women took to the bike in huge numbers, and mastery of the bicycle became a metaphor for women’s mastery over their lives.
Spurred by the emergence of the “safety” bicycle and the ensuing cultural craze, women’s professional bicycle racing thrived in the United States from 1895 to 1902. For seven years, female racers drew large and enthusiastic crowds across the country, including Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans—and many smaller cities in between. Unlike the trudging, round-the-clock marathons the men (and their spectators) endured, women’s six-day races were tightly scheduled, fast-paced, and highly competitive. The best female racers of the era—Tillie Anderson, Lizzie Glaw, and Dottie Farnsworth—became household names and were America’s first great women athletes. Despite concerted efforts by the League of American Wheelmen to marginalize the sport and by reporters and other critics to belittle and objectify the women, these athletes forced turn-of-the-century America to rethink strongly held convictions about female frailty and competitive spirit.
By 1900 many cities began to ban the men’s six-day races, and it became more difficult to ensure competitive women’s races and attract large enough crowds. In 1902 two racers died, and the sport’s seven-year run was finished—and it has been almost entirely ignored in sports history, women’s history, and even bicycling history. Women on the Move tells the full story of America’s most popular arena sport during the 1890s, giving these pioneering athletes the place they deserve in history.
Spurred by the emergence of the “safety” bicycle and the ensuing cultural craze, women’s professional bicycle racing thrived in the United States from 1895 to 1902. For seven years, female racers drew large and enthusiastic crowds across the country, including Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans—and many smaller cities in between. Unlike the trudging, round-the-clock marathons the men (and their spectators) endured, women’s six-day races were tightly scheduled, fast-paced, and highly competitive. The best female racers of the era—Tillie Anderson, Lizzie Glaw, and Dottie Farnsworth—became household names and were America’s first great women athletes. Despite concerted efforts by the League of American Wheelmen to marginalize the sport and by reporters and other critics to belittle and objectify the women, these athletes forced turn-of-the-century America to rethink strongly held convictions about female frailty and competitive spirit.
By 1900 many cities began to ban the men’s six-day races, and it became more difficult to ensure competitive women’s races and attract large enough crowds. In 1902 two racers died, and the sport’s seven-year run was finished—and it has been almost entirely ignored in sports history, women’s history, and even bicycling history. Women on the Move tells the full story of America’s most popular arena sport during the 1890s, giving these pioneering athletes the place they deserve in history.
360 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2018
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118 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 30, 2021
OK, so it is hard to know how good the book is because the audiobook is frankly so awful. Think of the actor who voiced Winnie the Pooh doing an impression of Rob Lowe's character in Parks and Rec, and you have this guy reading this book. Sometimes for fun he also apparently plays the Shatner game. About 40% of the words in this audiobook are read as if they have no connection to any of the words surrounding them, and the occasional mispronunciation ("acrost", "the safety bike error", "eplog", and a few other hits) add a piquant note.
That said, the content is very interesting. The narrative flow is not always as clear as it could be, maybe. However, I think if it weren't for the delivery, this would be a stirring narrative about the often-suppressed brief history of women's bicycle racing and of the effect of cycling on the women's movement overall.
That said, the content is very interesting. The narrative flow is not always as clear as it could be, maybe. However, I think if it weren't for the delivery, this would be a stirring narrative about the often-suppressed brief history of women's bicycle racing and of the effect of cycling on the women's movement overall.
October 30, 2018
If you're a fan of track cycling, this is a must read. Mr. Gilles did a superb amount of research on a topic that has been largely forgotten and not given the respect it deserves. This book provides a thrilling description of races and a sobering reminder of the sexism faced by these talented athletes.
December 17, 2018
Truly exciting accounts of suppressed cycling history. The race coverage is thrilling even 125 years later. Excellent scholarship.
April 15, 2019
Honestly, many books dealing with one or more aspects of bicycle history are dry and largely difficult to get through. At least, that is true for me. Your mileage may vary.
That is NOT the case with Roger Gilles' "Women on the Move." Like its title, this work moves right along at an engaging and, occasionally, exciting pace.
The author clearly has done his research, which I believe was largely driven by the scrapbooks created by and for Tillie Anderson. Those scrapbooks are unlikely to have held all the information he used. The endnotes reveal heavy use of newspapers from around the country to fill in the gaps.
While the focus is clearly on Tillie Anderson, about whom the author had the most information, we do get a sense, to one degree or another, of the other women racing bicycles in the last decade of the 19th century and the first two years of the 20th century. The main women riders - Tillie Anderson, Lillie Glaw, Dottie Farnsworth, Mate Christopher, May Allen, Helen Baldwin, Pearl Keyes, Frankie Nelson, and Lisette nee Amelie Le Gall - were more than competent. Riding short tracks built indoors with heavily banked turns it was common for the women to ride hour-long races averaging 23 miles per hour. On occasion they approached 28 miles per hour.
Unfortunately, given the era, none of these races were sanctioned by the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), the exclusively white male national organization controlling all things bicycle in the United States. Because the women's races were not sanctioned they could not use LAW referees and were not officially timed. Nor were the tracks officially measured to ensure their lengths were as claimed. In addition, the LAW threatened to bar men from sanctioned races for two years if they dared to race with women.
Still, what an era, brief though it may have been, for women's bicycle racing.
If you are at all interested in bicycle history, particularly the sporting side of things, this is the book for you. Likewise if you are interested in women in sport.
That is NOT the case with Roger Gilles' "Women on the Move." Like its title, this work moves right along at an engaging and, occasionally, exciting pace.
The author clearly has done his research, which I believe was largely driven by the scrapbooks created by and for Tillie Anderson. Those scrapbooks are unlikely to have held all the information he used. The endnotes reveal heavy use of newspapers from around the country to fill in the gaps.
While the focus is clearly on Tillie Anderson, about whom the author had the most information, we do get a sense, to one degree or another, of the other women racing bicycles in the last decade of the 19th century and the first two years of the 20th century. The main women riders - Tillie Anderson, Lillie Glaw, Dottie Farnsworth, Mate Christopher, May Allen, Helen Baldwin, Pearl Keyes, Frankie Nelson, and Lisette nee Amelie Le Gall - were more than competent. Riding short tracks built indoors with heavily banked turns it was common for the women to ride hour-long races averaging 23 miles per hour. On occasion they approached 28 miles per hour.
Unfortunately, given the era, none of these races were sanctioned by the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), the exclusively white male national organization controlling all things bicycle in the United States. Because the women's races were not sanctioned they could not use LAW referees and were not officially timed. Nor were the tracks officially measured to ensure their lengths were as claimed. In addition, the LAW threatened to bar men from sanctioned races for two years if they dared to race with women.
Still, what an era, brief though it may have been, for women's bicycle racing.
If you are at all interested in bicycle history, particularly the sporting side of things, this is the book for you. Likewise if you are interested in women in sport.
January 11, 2021
I think my biking friends will really enjoy this one. The author unearthed a largely forgotten chapter in women's athletics (and athletics in general) and brought it to life, complete with rivalries, sexist newspaper columnists who fixated on the women's looks rather than their abilities, and the marketing challenges of promoting a sport in which contestants go around and around on a track for hours.
I personally connected with this book because a couple years ago, I was part of the last beginner's class at the velodrome in Blaine, Minnesota, before it was torn down. I know how terrifying and exhilarating it is to ride a fixed-gear bike with no brakes around a wooden track with 45-degree-angle banked turns (and exhausting, because there's no coasting and you have to maintain a fairly high speed to remain upright on the steep turns). It's amazing to me that these women were reaching speeds of close to 30 mph on late-1800s bikes. They were truly remarkable athletes and I'm so glad this book gives them their due at long last.
I personally connected with this book because a couple years ago, I was part of the last beginner's class at the velodrome in Blaine, Minnesota, before it was torn down. I know how terrifying and exhilarating it is to ride a fixed-gear bike with no brakes around a wooden track with 45-degree-angle banked turns (and exhausting, because there's no coasting and you have to maintain a fairly high speed to remain upright on the steep turns). It's amazing to me that these women were reaching speeds of close to 30 mph on late-1800s bikes. They were truly remarkable athletes and I'm so glad this book gives them their due at long last.
September 23, 2020
An action-packed history of women's bicycle racing in the 1890s. Gilles retells the drama of many of the six-day races in which, incredibly, women rode around a velodrome-like track for up to three hours a night for six days. What's fascinating is the cyclists' strategy and tactics to win, and how thousands of people came to watch.
"In the summer of 1888...[May Allen] and Helen [Baldwin], both just sixteen and already close friends, needing money and wanting an adventure, answered an advertisement for women to compete in an upcoming bicycle race. The girls--both slightly built and barely five feet tall--had to persuade the manager to accept them." p. 33
Because Tillie Anderson and her husband Phil kept detailed scrapbooks, much of the book focuses on Tillie. But other prominent cyclists' lives are followed: Frankie Nelson, Lisette, Dottie Farnsworth, and Lizzie Glaw.
"In the summer of 1888...[May Allen] and Helen [Baldwin], both just sixteen and already close friends, needing money and wanting an adventure, answered an advertisement for women to compete in an upcoming bicycle race. The girls--both slightly built and barely five feet tall--had to persuade the manager to accept them." p. 33
Because Tillie Anderson and her husband Phil kept detailed scrapbooks, much of the book focuses on Tillie. But other prominent cyclists' lives are followed: Frankie Nelson, Lisette, Dottie Farnsworth, and Lizzie Glaw.
November 7, 2021
Women on the Move is a really fun read. Roger Gilles has done a wonderful job of capturing all the journalism around these years of women's bicycle racing in the US (1896-1899). There was bitter rivalry between these women and Gilles has captured its intensity. Tillie Anderson is the main subject of the book, but there is also quite a lot of great detail about Lissette and other women racing at this time. The book makes no academic pretensions so it is unfair to criticize it for not discussing these years of racing in light of feminism, social studies or some other theoretical framework. It tells the story about these women at this time and leaves the reader feeling informed and satisfied.
July 29, 2021
Incredible recollection of the early gold years of the wheel and the power house women who rode thousands of miles to spread cycling around America!
Also, an amazing amount of detail, at times overkill… I’m so thrilled this research was done and made into a book that will and should be cherished and read by all cyclists to appreciate the Trail Blazers.
And to anyone who has not raced or even just watched a track race live, you must! It is thrilling and the best quad burn!
Also, an amazing amount of detail, at times overkill… I’m so thrilled this research was done and made into a book that will and should be cherished and read by all cyclists to appreciate the Trail Blazers.
And to anyone who has not raced or even just watched a track race live, you must! It is thrilling and the best quad burn!
January 9, 2024
When this book was selected for book club, I expected it to be boring. Instead Gilles captured me in the introduction and didn't let me go as he told about the ambition, ingenuity, strength and endurance of these women who dared to be apart of the new sport of bicycle racing.
March 3, 2020
Interesting topic I knew nothing about. The book managed to be a relatively quick and engaging read, which kept it from dragging for me.
May 9, 2020
A fascinating read overall. The book could use more of a narrative arch late as it falls into too much race by race type summarizing.
February 7, 2024
The women are incredible. I didn't finish it because it was getting repetitive.
May 28, 2019
Analysts of the 1890s have often focussed on the era as one of new-ness, of change, of innovation in all manner of social and cultural spheres, some referring to time as one of the neophiliacs, the lovers of the new. It was certainly an era of rapid technological transformation, in transport as much as anywhere else, with new types of bicycles, including the ‘safety’ (the form we’re still used to) and the motorised, as well as the development of the motor car. It’s widely accepted that this was also a time of change for women, and that the bicycle became an important part of both the symbols of change and the practice of that change. Given the changes going on and the growing phenomenon of endurance sport – multiday cycle and foot races, long distance events and the like that would continue well into the 20th century – we should not be surprised that there was also women’s long distance cycle racing. It is this that is explored in the engaging, richly research and excitingly written recovery history of this phenomenon in the US Mid-West.
As so often happens with historical narratives, the genesis of this is serendipitous – an historic postcard, a chance meeting with an athlete’s relative, and an unwitting commitment (unwitting in terms of magnitude, only). Gilles was lucky to have met the descendent of one of the leading women racing cyclists of the late 1890s who not only remembered her great aunt, but had her scrapbooks, personal archive and had assembled her own archive of ephemera: this is ideal for an historian – much of the basic narrative building has been done, and it comes with a pointer to where to look for more evidence.
Gilles uses this material, its access and pointers extremely well to build a detailed account of the rise and fall of competitive women’s cycles, which in the Mid-West focussed on a small number of highly competitive, extremely good racers who, on their single geared cycles of the time could average over 25mph or more over several hours (as a well lapsed recreation distance road cyclist on modern lightweight heavily geared cycles, I am in awe). He uses the newspaper and other source material well to build a sense of the detail of races, the jockeying between riders and through that the excitement of the times. He is also able to develop a clear sense of the women’s public personas at least: there is little in the way of personal records and most of the leading riders died in accidents or from illness within 10 years or so of the end of the high point of racing: only 2 survived into the 1920s and none left memoirs or other records. The only personal records he has therefore are those of Tillie Anderson Sjoberg’s family – his initial ‘in’ to the issue: he does use these well to give social, familial and cultural contexts but cannot from these address the question of typicality.
Much as these are the great strengths of the book, Gilles relative weakness in sports and gender history means that this fabulous, rich and exciting story is not as well contextualised as it could be, and therefore this family evidence broadly assessed. He has a clear sense of the debates around women’s physicality and sport, but there is little that is made explicit and no indication of any engagement with the medical histories of the era that were held to sustain social and moral exclusion. Neither does he give a sense of how and why the exclusionary tactics of the League of American Wheelmen, cycling’s governing body, were not atypical but the norm for many of sports’ leading organisations at the time. It may be his attachment to the empirical base, but it would also have been good to have seen some consideration of, or at least reflection on, the differences in objectives and drivers between the women riders and their commercially driven promoters.
While these weaknesses are significant, the story he tells is compelling and an important contribution to our knowledge of the era, to our explorations of women’s sport and physicality, and to our understandings of endurance sport. It is in his discussions of how the model of men’s endurance sport was explicitly rejected by these Mid-Westerners to build a sporting and entertainment event that had to be read on its own terms that he might make the most important contribution: here was a successful, if short lived (about 6 years), competition that did not see itself as a version of a men’s activity but as a sport that needed to be understood on its own terms, with its own tactics and demands and its own requirements. In this, it is an intriguing, engaging and important contribution.
As so often happens with historical narratives, the genesis of this is serendipitous – an historic postcard, a chance meeting with an athlete’s relative, and an unwitting commitment (unwitting in terms of magnitude, only). Gilles was lucky to have met the descendent of one of the leading women racing cyclists of the late 1890s who not only remembered her great aunt, but had her scrapbooks, personal archive and had assembled her own archive of ephemera: this is ideal for an historian – much of the basic narrative building has been done, and it comes with a pointer to where to look for more evidence.
Gilles uses this material, its access and pointers extremely well to build a detailed account of the rise and fall of competitive women’s cycles, which in the Mid-West focussed on a small number of highly competitive, extremely good racers who, on their single geared cycles of the time could average over 25mph or more over several hours (as a well lapsed recreation distance road cyclist on modern lightweight heavily geared cycles, I am in awe). He uses the newspaper and other source material well to build a sense of the detail of races, the jockeying between riders and through that the excitement of the times. He is also able to develop a clear sense of the women’s public personas at least: there is little in the way of personal records and most of the leading riders died in accidents or from illness within 10 years or so of the end of the high point of racing: only 2 survived into the 1920s and none left memoirs or other records. The only personal records he has therefore are those of Tillie Anderson Sjoberg’s family – his initial ‘in’ to the issue: he does use these well to give social, familial and cultural contexts but cannot from these address the question of typicality.
Much as these are the great strengths of the book, Gilles relative weakness in sports and gender history means that this fabulous, rich and exciting story is not as well contextualised as it could be, and therefore this family evidence broadly assessed. He has a clear sense of the debates around women’s physicality and sport, but there is little that is made explicit and no indication of any engagement with the medical histories of the era that were held to sustain social and moral exclusion. Neither does he give a sense of how and why the exclusionary tactics of the League of American Wheelmen, cycling’s governing body, were not atypical but the norm for many of sports’ leading organisations at the time. It may be his attachment to the empirical base, but it would also have been good to have seen some consideration of, or at least reflection on, the differences in objectives and drivers between the women riders and their commercially driven promoters.
While these weaknesses are significant, the story he tells is compelling and an important contribution to our knowledge of the era, to our explorations of women’s sport and physicality, and to our understandings of endurance sport. It is in his discussions of how the model of men’s endurance sport was explicitly rejected by these Mid-Westerners to build a sporting and entertainment event that had to be read on its own terms that he might make the most important contribution: here was a successful, if short lived (about 6 years), competition that did not see itself as a version of a men’s activity but as a sport that needed to be understood on its own terms, with its own tactics and demands and its own requirements. In this, it is an intriguing, engaging and important contribution.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews