Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America by Sarah Hallenbeck (review)

Sarah Hallenbeck's book studies the ways in which female cyclists redefined and shaped the bicycle during the last two decades of the nineteenth century in the United States, by riding the bicycle, by writing about it, and by engaging themselves in diverse bicycle-related activities. The author's main claim is that through a variety of material and rhetorical actions, women used the bicycle as a means of enacting social change. Her interest lies not so much in the possibly emancipating effects of the bicycle, but more in the acts of emancipation women could take with the help of it.

The book has four main chapters. The first deals with bicycle-related inventions patented by women. The second analyzes cycling women as fictional and factual characters in pieces published in popular magazines. The third chapter takes a look at bicycle manuals written specifically for women, and the final chapter demonstrates how female commentators and bicycle racers could erode the formerly dominant view of female bodies' biological weakness and frailty.

Claiming the Bicyclewas published in a series called Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms, and the book's main theoretical frame is that of rhetoric studies. Hallenbeck's overall approach is to frame female actions around the bicycle as "collected" rhetorical activity: varied in form, forum, and intention, not united through an organizational collective, but nonetheless cumulating through visibility and repetition into something coordinated and effective. Hallenbeck develops this argument throughout in a convincing manner. Some of the most interesting points of analysis include the collective nature of bicycle inventions, the different textual approaches to the challenge of learning to ride, and the uncoordinated collaboration of female bicycle racers and commentators in material-discursive practices that renegotiated the boundaries of female bodies.

Hallenbeck uses different theoretical approaches and tools in different chapters. The long introductory chapter preceding the four main ones has the most direct linkage to the history of technology. She writes about the introduction of the Safety bicycle and the disappearance of the tricycle as "a regendering of the bicycle." She refers to the Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch analysis of this technological change and agrees with it but proceeds to look in more detail at the role of female activity, especially that of the female tricycle riders. She highlights the problems that incompatibility between the high-wheeled Ordinary and the tricycle caused in bicycle club activities as more female riders entered clubs. She uses Nelly Oudshoorn's concept of "gender script" to trace the change from highly gendered scripting of the Ordinary and the tricycle to a more "blurred" or "subtle" gender scripting of Safety models.

Despite these references, Hallenbeck does not seek broader linkage to the research traditions of the history of technology. This is most noticeable in her neglect of almost all of the existing bicycle historiography. She only refers to a scarce handful of scholars in bicycle history, most notably David Herlihy and Bruce Epperson. Many more deserved reference, including Christina E. Dando, Anne-Katrin Ebert, and Paul Smethurst. The most surprising omission is that of Glen Norcliffe's publications, several of which directly deal with women and the bicycle in the 1890s. By failing to take into account non-American bicycle histories, Hallenbeck also misses the strongly transnational but class-bound nature of the late-nineteenth-century cycling culture and therefore an important wider context for female cyclists' activities.

In the conclusion, Hallenbeck offers techno-feminist rhetorical agency as a tool for achieving an active, critical, and creative user approach to technology today. The idea is refreshing. However, the somewhat black-and-white idea of user agency as lost heritage could have been challenged, had she paid more attention to the growing number of studies on technological appropriation, user practices, and tinkering.

Although Claiming the Bicycledoes not break new empirical ground regarding female cyclists, gendered bicycle design, or bicycle innovations, it offers an unprecedentedly detailed...