Elizabeth Taylor
another
“She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life“.
For a long time I had mixed feelings about Frances Willard; I admired her as a suffragist, but was troubled by her work in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Then I came across a pamphlet she wrote: How I Learned To Ride The Bicycle. What’s remarkable about the pamphlet is that it was published in 1895. She’d learned to ride the bike three years earlier. At the age of fifty-three.
Clad in her modest bicycling costume, which consisted of “a skirt and blouse of tweed, with belt, rolling collar, and loose cravat, the skirt three inches from the ground; a round straw hat; and walking-shoes with gaiters,” she set out to make women independently mobile. It would take another 28 years for women in the U.S. to earn the right to vote, but when they got it, thanks to Frances Willard, they didn’t need to rely on a man to get them to the polls.
“I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world.”
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