Garvey,
Ellen Gruber. “Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and
Scorching Women” American Quarterly. Vol. 47, No. 1 (March 1995):
66-101.
In the 1890’s women struggled to find ways of making bicycling more acceptable to the traditional Victorian values, and managed to eventually turn it into a leisure sport reserved for the upper classes. The ‘New Woman’ was a figure that provoked much public ridicule and hostility, and there was a need for women to rid themselves of the negative connotations of bicycling so that they could ride without discrimination. Garvey says that advertising aided women by promoting “a version of women's bicycling that reframed its apparent social risks as benefits” but also feminized the bicycle through the advertisement of feminine bicycle fashion, feminine bicycle models and in magazine fiction. However, a conflict arose in the motives behind the bicycle as a symbol of feminism, because through advertising, it began to revert backward to traditional notions of gender identity in order to become an accepted female activity. [RJ]
In the 1890’s women struggled to find ways of making bicycling more acceptable to the traditional Victorian values, and managed to eventually turn it into a leisure sport reserved for the upper classes. The ‘New Woman’ was a figure that provoked much public ridicule and hostility, and there was a need for women to rid themselves of the negative connotations of bicycling so that they could ride without discrimination. Garvey says that advertising aided women by promoting “a version of women's bicycling that reframed its apparent social risks as benefits” but also feminized the bicycle through the advertisement of feminine bicycle fashion, feminine bicycle models and in magazine fiction. However, a conflict arose in the motives behind the bicycle as a symbol of feminism, because through advertising, it began to revert backward to traditional notions of gender identity in order to become an accepted female activity. [RJ]
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