Untrammeled Womanhood

Where have I been, you ask. (Or maybe not, since you probably pay no more attention to my blog than I do these days.) No, I wasn't turned into space dust by the passing Space Shuttle. Nor has a giant blob of solar plasma fried my circuits. And while we're on the subject, no, this wasn't me either.

I've just been busy, pretending to work hard at writing an essay for my class on Victorian Britain, but really just messing around on the internets, intermittently writing the odd sentence for my paper, entitled 'A Bicycle Built for Two Million: How the two-wheeler went from clumsy to conventional and, along the way, changed Victorian society.'

I love writing subheads. Must be 140 characters or less.

Here's my favorite quote:

Of the bicycle’s effect on female emancipation, the American suffragette Susan B. Anthony said: ‘Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.’

Here's another tidbit (twitbit?), for which I owe a debt to Thomas Nephew, who tweeted me an answer when I asked about Victorians and bicycles. He'd read a Sherlock Holmes mystery about a female bicyclist who was stalked by the requisite sinister Holmes' chap. Intrigued, I looked it up and found it lent a nice touch to my point about women and bicycles:

With their own two wheels, women could go where they wished, including to places of employment. Bicycles were much cheaper than horses, and female clerks and shop workers could afford them even on the lower wages they earned. Yet there was still peril, real or perceived. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist, writes of Miss Violet Smith, who while riding her bicycle was stalked by a sinister character presumably out for her virtue. A warning to other women, perhaps, to take care while enjoying their new-found freedom.

For my next trick, I plan to write about a woman on a bicycle who meets a chap from a UFO. He will have a sinister Swedish accent, and warn of giant blobs of solar plasma.