Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women's Bicycle Racing by Roger Gilles (review)

Women on the Move explores the oft-ignored female cyclists who raced during the bicycle craze of the mid- to late 1890s. The book aims to fill a historiographical gap concerning cycling, sport, and gender. During the high-wheel and safety-bicycle eras, male racers received much of the attention from the media, racing promoters, and fans, so their stories have been privileged by historians. But as Roger Gilles describes, alongside this large male presence at the racing track was a contingent of "cycliennes" who were just as passionate, powerful, and competitive as their male counterparts.

Women's racing did not take off until the introduction of the groundbreaking safety bicycle. Its predecessor, the high-wheel, was also popular for racing, but few women competed and those who did were not taken seriously by the public because cycling was considered inappropriate for the "fairer sex." The introduction of "the safety," however, prompted more women to take up the sport. Women's races were added to the docket at many of the newly constructed cycling tracks in the midwestern, northeastern, and southeastern United States. According to Gilles, they became so popular that "they represented an estimable threat to men's racing" (p. 112).

The book is composed of six parts that track the evolution of women's bicycle racing, beginning with women's foray into the sport and ending with the collapse of the bicycle craze. Within each part is a series of short chapters that spotlight specific aspects of the racing phenomenon, including the competitors, the races, the impact of media and technology, societal views of racing, and the gendered nature of the sport.

Throughout the book, Gilles explores some of the broader concerns attached to women's cycling—independence, feminine frailty, manliness, exertion—and how they were magnified on the track. Bicycle races in the 1890s were grueling multi-day feats where riders raced hundreds of miles at quick speeds. Though altered to be more "ladylike," the women's races still took a toll on competitors. Exhaustion, injuries, and burnout were common. Female racers were also subjected to speculation about their marital status, critiqued on their appearance, sexualized by the media, and characterized as jealous divas. While Gilles does an admirable job of covering the countless barriers female racers faced, more could have been done to situate these women within the complex social and cultural world of the later Victorian age. Bicycle racing meant bucking popular notions of ideal womanhood. The sport was performed in public, offered monetary compensation, required supreme athleticism, and put women's bodies on display. In the 1890s, women were still largely barred from joining men's sporting organizations, but cycling was somewhat of an exception. According to Gilles, "of all the sports currently in fashion that decade, cycling offered women the best chance to compete evenly with the men" (p. 70).

Gilles concludes by noting that like the bicycle craze, the spectacle of women's racing was short-lived. The author does an exceptional job of tracing how and why this occurred. Racing reached its peak around 1897 when the races were high stakes, the rivalries intense, and big money was on the line. By 1898, the sport had begun to die out after a new points system was introduced, leading to speculation that the races were fixed. By the end of the decade, as bicycles fell out of fashion, women's racing was relegated to smaller venues and many of the top competitors retired. Just as the bicycle had lost its social cachet, so too had the racers and their feats.

Much of the book revolves around the achievements of Tillie "the Swede" Anderson, a twenty-something, working-class immigrant who purchased her first bicycle in 1894, and thereafter became a dominant force on the track. Anderson was part of a small contingent of women who raced...