The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle
The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle
The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became connected with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential, with the loosening of social restrictions and with geographic mobility. Engaging first with medical as well as public debates around the perceived physical and social effects of the bicycle, along with guidebooks for female cyclists, the chapter moves on to consider how the bicycle through literature becomes a symbol of emancipation. Reading H. G. Wells Wheels of Chance (1897) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the notion of the bicycle as a democratising ‘freedom machine’, by insisting on the class specifics of the New Woman and the commercialism of the late-Victorian literary market.
Keywords: New Woman, Bicycle, Popular fiction, Class, H. G. Wells, Grant Allen
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