Bicycle (Safety Bicycle)

Some moral panics come with a medical diagnosis you couldn't quite make up. The late-Victorian bicycle boom set off a pronounced panic about women's freedom, and from it we got "bicycle face."

The technology at the centre of the fuss was John Kemp Starley's Rover Safety Bicycle (1885) — "safety" because, unlike the earlier penny-farthing with its enormous front wheel and interesting landing characteristics, this one had two equal-sized wheels, a chain drive, and (from 1888, once Dunlop added pneumatic tyres) a ride that ordinary people could actually manage. Crucially, women could manage it too. For the first time, women could travel unchaperoned on two wheels, a prospect that outraged conservative society. Journalists and clergymen condemned female cyclists for supposed "wantonness," claiming the bicycle tempted women away from home and propriety. Unaccompanied lady riders were harassed in the streets — some pelted with stones or obscenities — amid fears that these "unchaperoned" outings would lead to vice. Pundits warned that a woman pedalling off alone might be pedalling straight into immorality: it was widely suggested that cycling was a "slippery slope to sex work," or even a convenient cover for lesbian meetings. The required clothing did not help: women taking up bloomers (loose trousers gathered at the knee, named after the American reformer Amelia Bloomer) for cycling were openly defying what respectable women were meant to wear below the waist, which was skirts and an air of helpless modesty.

Then the doctors weighed in. The British physician Dr Arthur Shadwell popularised "bicycle face" in an 1897 National Review article, warning that vigorous cycling fixed a strained, exhausted expression on the rider's face permanently. Other medical voices added that cycling could deform women's bodies or drive them mad. Against all this, the American suffragist Susan B. Anthony — then the most famous campaigner for women's voting rights in the world — told the journalist Nellie Bly in 1896 that the bicycle "has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."

The medical warnings about bicycle face were absurd. The deeper fear — that mobility and independence would transform what women could do and be — was precisely right. The bicycle turned out to be an instrument of emancipation rather than illness. The faces were fine.