The Photographic Enactment of the Early New Woman in 1890s German Women's Bicycling Magazines

The studio photographs of women bicyclists sent in by the readers of the German women's bicycling magazines Draisena and Die Rodlerin in the latter half of the 1890s are read as evidence that an Early German New Woman was busy defining emancipation independently from the organized women's movement long before the New Woman of the 1920s. The photographic evidence of the magazines helps elucidate the terms "emancipation" and the "New Woman" in relation to bicycling and corrects historical scholarship that too easily conflates these terms with sport and the German women's movement, primarily due to the ubiquity of turn-of-the century bicycle advertisements.