Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the Myth, the Legend, our own Penny Farthing super producer, mister Max Williams.
Max Penniworth Farthington Williams, Third Esquire.
That actually isn't too far off from my actual name.
Huh, it's a joke. Hey, stop watches right? How many times a day? Once? I guess yes.
Twice, technically twice. I am Ben Bullet. You are, mister Noel Brown.
I'm only just now learning how its out time.
I recently got my first analog watch, and I'm still struggling with it a little bit.
But it's a lot of fun, and we are going to have a lot of fun with you today, hopefully, Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we are looking at one of our favorite contraptions ever, the bicycle, and the role it played in women's rights.
I like to ride my bikes here. I like to ride it where I like.
I just got back from a bike ride.
It was nice. I love a bike. I love a bicycle. I also love women's rights.
And you were definitely not on a penny farthing. You are on something descended from what we call the safety bicycle or the safeties from L eighteen hundreds.
It sounds nerdy when you say like that, but I was wearing a helmet, I di am a safe by cyclist, and I was riding on a little thing we here in Atlanta area called the belt line, and I made a trader Joe's run, got some snacks, and rode on back.
It was a good time.
Yeah, And the safety bicycle is part of the reason this is a good time because it did replace the penny farthing, which, in addition to looking absolutely ridiculous, is also pretty pretty dangerous.
So the pity.
Farthing was like an early adopter thing. We'll get to it. But what you need to know at the offset here, folks, is that there was a sea change in cycling and society with the emergence of that safety bicycle. It sparked what our research associate Maria calls a cycling craze in the United States and abroad.
Well, I mean, anyone who's seen someone ride a penny farthing, also known as the bone a bone shaker if deadwood is to be believed. It was actually a plot point in that show, not necessarily because of its danger as a vehicle, but it caught a chain of events that led to some tragic plot moving occurrences in the show.
But if anyone's ever seen.
Someone riding one of those, like one of those muscleman with the handlebar mustaches, you know, it's kind of more like a feat like a trick, like riding a unicycle or using stilts or I'm sure you know there's big wheel on the front, a little wheel on the back. There's a reason people don't go to the grocery store on pogo sticks. It's more of flex of activity. I've actually, I've had the dubious pleasure of riding Penny Farthing bikes several times.
They are difficult, they are not forgiving. But we do owe a lot of modern society's rights to the advent of the safety bicycle. As Maria tells us, there were basically three groups of women in the eighteen nineties who were who are part of our story here. One, there are people who happen to be women who just want to ride bikes because bikes are cool.
Yeah, they want to ride them where they like, it's very freeing.
It's honestly the invention of the original, the penny farthing. I mean, that was in and of itself a very freeing innovation. You know, it allowed people to ambulate without the use of their legs.
And this, I like the point about freedom there, noel, because our second group will be actual activists, women's rights activist who said, hey, this bicycle is a palpable tool of independence. This gives us freedom, this gives us agency. And then the third group, the bad guys of the story, the baddies, the people who said women on bikes, that's an abomination. Next thing you know, they'll be wearing.
Pantaloons wanting to vote right God forbid.
So this this is our story for today, folks. The safety bike did play a huge role in the women's rights movement, and it's one that a lot of people didn't see coming. Kind of like how hat pins became a tool against assault of mashers.
Yeah, just so all those wolf whistling, mashing men out there on those streets, the ladies wouldn't put up with it.
They'd give them a jab with their hat pins.
And now we're entering onto the stage. A group of people who are very harm for Rump, for Rump, something must be done. When faced with a female population that had independent transportation and was wearing pants, they were trying to react in an ad hominem kind of way. It reminds me a lot, you guys, of that strange propaganda we saw during COVID vaccination or wearing masks, where people would say, oh, if people are wearing masks, you don't
know if their children being trafficked. This is so ridiculous. The opposition said the reason women shouldn't ride bicycles was due to something that they called bicycle face.
Is this related to like, why don't you smile more kind of mentality?
Okay? Cool? Or RB clocking yeah, RBF.
The safety bicycle, as you said, men, I, was at the heart of this epidemic that people were referring to as bicycle face, and of course replaced the penny farthing, which had been super popular in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. Some models included the Aerial in eighteen seventy one and the very creatively and banally named the Ordinary
in eighteen seventy eight. These types of bikes were typically associated with young, rich, white dudes, but men of all kinds were participating in this sort of like I said, feet of strength. These bikes could go up to a whopping thirty miles an hour, some say more, and the design was favored for this ability to pick up speed.
But that's really where it ends. As we talked about, this is some really odd ball, awkward, unwieldy elements to the design of this thing, including the fact that the rider's seat, which you well know, Ben, was nearly five feet off of the ground.
Oh yeah, it's one of those things where you've got to get a running start. I've been teaching my girlfriend's niece how to ride bikes, and I'm just so happy that the kid is not on a penny farthing. Side note for our fellow etymology nerds, it's got a weird name, the penny farthing. It's also been called the high wheel, but the name comes because of the size difference between the British penny and the farthing.
Coins.
Wow, penny is way bigger. That's the front wheel, and the farthing is a lot smaller. That's the rear wheel.
I think we all learned something new today, Ben. I did not know that.
Prior to reading Maria's excellent research brief. So as you can imagine, and as we've already hinted at, it was super dangerous and considered much more of a thrill seeking kind of activity, not necessarily known for its practicality. And many folks, if we're talking about some more etymology, would take a fall or a header as it was known and coined from this problem, literally diving headfirst over what
are referred to as mustache handlebars. I guess people were making their mustaches match the handlebars.
And also, if you please, if you get a chance, pull up a picture of a penny farthing. We can't tell you to try it at home because they are dangerous. And I took a few headers myself. You're going to see that.
It's such a weird contraption. Because the.
Seat of this vehicle is pretty much parallel to the handlebars, it is very easy to go too fast or to lose your balance and have a decent wampwamp. This really inspired or irritated a guy named John Kemp Starly. We don't know how many headers Starly took, but our buddy Johnny around eighteen eighty five said, this is malarkey. I'm going to invent a new bicycle. It's going to be straight seahorse teeth, and I'm going to emphasize how safe it is.
What if we had two wheels that were the same size.
What if we had gears, Oh my gosh, what if we finally tried to fix the brakes?
For sure, big improvements in all those respects, the brakes and the pretty farthing.
I think we're very, very rudimentary.
In eighteen ninety, what was deemed, you know, in the zeitgeist as safeties were upgraded with pneumatic tires, which are very similar to the ones we know today, tires made of rubber that are filled with air.
Lesson not very less.
Boneek has another reason that that was called that for sure a new invention that made for a much more comfortable ride just in terms of traversing various types of terrain. It soaked up a lot of the impact, Like you're saying, ben So by the mid decade, bikes dropped in weight too.
You know, you don't want to clunky bike.
Anyone who's ridden one of those new New York City city bikes knows that that can be a real scary proposition and definitely makes it a lot less fun and zippy. So they dropped from about fifty pounds to twenty three, which was a serious glow up considering the previous bikes and bike like vehicles, which I honestly, I mean they call it the penny farthing and not the bicycle because it really is more of a bike like vehicle. We would, really, I I would argue that it is not particularly a bicycle.
It's not till we see the safeties that we really start seeing what became the bicycle. Didn't Some penny farthings also have like two wheels in the back, I want to say, they were.
Like, Yeah, there were also tripod designs, so you'd have two big wheels on either side of the seat and then you have a little wheel in the back. And there was there was so much research going into this idea of the you know, from between eighteen ninety two to eighteen ninety six, the industry was kind of acting like your favorite corporations act about AI today. There were so many patents going out for these bicycles. Yeah, feeding
frenzy is not a bad way to put it. The two designs of what we call the safety bicycle were the following the original had a crossbar. In eighteen eighty eight, they marketed a what they called a quote unquote women's version, and the one for women offered a drop frame to accommodate skirts, because we can't have people wearing pants, right. And you can still see this today in very popular bike designs from very popular companies like Shwin.
And it should be noted too that even today, I mean, there are differentiations between what would be considered a women's bike and a men's bike. Sometimes it has to do with size, but sometimes it does have to do with certain features like the frame design and stuff like that.
That drop r.
Yeah, and when the first Safeties came out, similar to the Penny Farthing, they were pretty expensive. They cost an average of one hundred and fifty US bucks per product. And this is a time, Maria points out, when the average US worker was earning maybe twelve dollars a week.
Yeah, that's a pretty serious investment for what at the time was probably still is kind of considered a curiosity.
It hadn't fully taken off yet.
Yeahs a novelty, right, and it's still the idea of the bicycle still sort of has its training wheels.
Hey, So as we mentioned that the main customer at this point.
Was rich white dudes.
But there were also, of course counterparts to these rich and white dudes who were rich white women and they wanted to get on the fun too.
Yeah, and because there was higher demand, the economy of gale kicks in and all these manufacturers who have their proliferation of patents and their own special spin on the velociped they.
What they call it in Deadwood as well.
They say, look, we're going to compete with each other, so they start reducing their prices. That's a very strange thing to a lot of us in the United States today, but companies did used to do that. They made bikes more affordable for what they called all the riders, which was again, as you pointed out, bro, it's a very small percentage of the overall population.
It is a good little view into just a basic economic microcosm of like supply and demand and how it's supposed to work. They're supposed to be competition in these types of spaces rather than you know, monopolies, which can lead to prices lowering and or quality raising in order for the different manufacturers to differentiate themselves, like in the
watch game. For example, you've got these really unattainably high priced watch protects FP grange, what is it, Automorpga those ones that are like you know, the price of a car or more. But they're also like decades and decades of development and you know, super super super refined processes and features, et cetera. And the more mid tier ones, you've got them a ton of competition because they really have to differentiate themselves from each other.
Yeah, So first off, yet to think about the complications, folks, which is the word for the mechanisms, which is.
Becomes true with bikes too.
I mean, we're talking about like it is a relatively clockwork esque system when we're talking about gear shifts and how many speeds does it have? And you know, what are the components, Like how well manufactured and machined and engineered they are.
We're going to start seeing more of that.
Yeah, And so we're still in the late eighteen eighties, so it's let's say it's eighteen eighty nine to eighteen ninety nine. So in that decade, the number of bicycles that are being purchased and used has shot up from something like two hundred thousand to one million in the
US alone. By eighteen ninety five, the United States has no less than three hundred separate bicycle companies, and if you average out what they were doing right during this decade, their safety bikes or safeties probably cost about seventy five dollars instead of one hundred and fifty. So the market was working at that time in yeah some way.
Well, yeah, for sure.
And as we mentioned earlier, you know women who likely had a bit more free time on their hands, at least to the wealthy you know, spouses of wealthy businessmen and you know people that were working ninety fives in the offices or whatever the hell they were doing in
those days. They often the women would not work, and so they had a lot more free time, and so of course it made sense that they would want some options of how to fill that free time, and biking offered a pretty great and active you know answer to that.
One hundred percent. Yeah, And this is mobility, right, this is freedom. This doesn't mean you have to keep a horse all the time.
And to this day, I think people really love biking because of some of those very same things. It's functional, it's functional exercise that gives you a sense of freedom and a lot of reasons. It turns out that motorists are kind of pills to bicyclists, is because they're sort of like, man, who does that person think he is being all free out there not stuck in traffic.
I'm gonna I'm gonna be a jerk.
I'm very pro bike and I have serious problems with our fair metropolis of Atlanta. You know what I'm talking about, Yeah, is approaching bicycles.
So we have we know.
That there are still improvements to be made, but we also know that there was a culture war about bicycles and women riding them, especially this period of history in the eighteen hundreds. You would see names in the press in real muck raking journalism or real tabloid style breathless headlines, stuff like weeld woman, lady Cyclist, or our favorite bloomert Right, because if you're picturing illustrations from the news rags of the day, you're probably picturing ladies on bicycles wearing these.
Big, old, fluffy pantaloon esque things that weren't quite pants, weren't quite dresses.
They were bloomers.
Yeah, that reminds me of this is like our cravat conversation we've been having. It reminds me of the phrase harem pants. Things that look like a skirt while you're standing, but they move like pants because they have that division. We know that this is occurring in a greater context, a greater milieu. In eighteen seventy eight, there was a woman suffrage amendment proposed in US Congress. It's just what it sounds like. It said, Hey, should this other fifty
percent of the population be allowed to vote? It failed, It did not pass until nineteen twenty. It is the nineteenth Amendment. And didn't think we would say this in this episode, but guys, shout out to Wyoming. Wyoming in eighteen sixty nine is the first state that allows women the right to vote. And you know here in twenty twenty six, Wyoming has a relatively conservative reputation, you know.
Real quick.
Shout out to the inventor of the Bloomers, by the way, which I think is an interesting tie in here. A woman named Amelia Bloomer, who was a women's rights advocate in the mid nineteenth century. He actually promoted the Bloomers as a practical alternative to the restrictive corsets and skirts that women were more or less required to wear, and it became a symbol of early reform for women's dress and kind of dovetailed with the women's suffrage and rights movements.
They were used often by activists for there again for comfort, but also they had a symbolic aspect to them, and of course cyclists as well as some early nineteenth and twentieth century athletes.
Yeah, so we're seeing freedom of movement on multiple levels, exactly on the are the literal level and on the figurative larger level. In eighteen seventy five, Scotis again fumbles the bag. This will be very familiar to a lot of our listeners in the US right now. The Supreme Court of the United States said, Look, the matter of women voting, that's really a matter for the states. If the if a given state wants to say women can't vote, then that's fine. Because women are people. We'll give you
that as they are citizens. But they are there is a quote a special category of non voting.
Aka sub human right some degree, he's animal farm.
Everybody's equal, but some are more equal than others.
Speaking of which, bend, are you aware of this?
Apparently quite awful animated Animal Farm that has just been getting shredded. It's like a CGI animated version of Animal Farm, weirdly helmed by Andy Serkis, who I think we're all fans of, but apparently it is just absolutely misses the mark on every aspect of what Animal Farm is about and is just like gross out humor and completely a travist.
Just antithetical. Or Well, just read the book, folks, take a you know it's it's such a short read because especially because Orwell comes from a journalism background, so he writes with density and a clarity.
And truer now than ever, more valid and interesting. Now, you know, Parrot with nineteen eighty four if you really want to.
Get on that. I don't want to hang out with George. I love him as a writer, uh and I never really spent a lot of time with him, but man, he's going to be too smug. If he came back to life here, he would be insufferable. He'd be Kanye West level smug and Max, we got to go to you.
You got something here? Yeah, And I just want to know.
Andy Serkis of Claribscure Expedition thirty three fame, along with other things like being dollom and whatnot. But yeah, clareupscare shoutout Tonel Farms great, great.
And shout out to uh Klang or whatever his name was Kran And you know in the Black Panther uh series, Uh Andy.
Yeah right yeah. Andy Circus also my favorite role that he ever played. Well, he's not a handful of things that I really enjoyed. In the film twenty four Hour Party People, he plays the genius and irasble, the irascible genius producer of a lot of the Factory Records bands there in Manchester, bands like Joy Division, and he plays them great. He's a total grumpy curmudgeon. It's really really great film. If you're into the history of indie music.
And while we're taking a slight diversion, folks, please give Andy Serkis the actor his recognition because he always reminded me so his come up always reminded me of te Pain. So a lot of people looked at Tee Paid and didn't know the guy could really sing because he made the artistic choice to use auto tune. A lot of people say that Andy Circus uh wasn't was somehow less than of an actor because he became so famous doing motion capture stuff.
But goes into that man, I mean, yeah, for sure, really good, much like that Doug Jones, you know, got famous for playing you know, monsters and wearing heavy makeup. It's all about his movements and his you know, the nuance that he brings to that. And you know, I think Andy serkis as King Kong quite moving and it all has to do with the performance.
So yes, credit where credit is.
Due, Credit where credit is due. Shout out to you if you shout out to you, especially Tea Pain. If anybody hasn't seen Tea Pain's Tiny Desk concert, please do check it out. No auto tune. The man has the voice of a spirit, it does.
Yeah, check out that Tiny Desk. It's fantastic. But back to Velocipedes.
Yeah, not all women are in the country of the United States are lining up to buy a bike, and not all women who wanted to bike considered themselves activist. You know this this is strange because history always always tends to forget nuance. We have to remember that people are just people, and some people just wanted to have
a great ride around that was faster than walking. That to them, it didn't necessarily indicate some greater social shift, but they were all these people were existing under patriarchal society, descended from the Victorian era, which had a lot of misogyny, anti feminism stuff. They hated when women could do anything. They're riding a bike, what's next voting? They probably said, we should never have given this part of the population shoes.
That's how they started walking around outside. That's where the problem began.
No, it's that same attitude that went into like, you know, keeping slaves from learning how to read. I mean not to be too aggressive about it, but it comes from the same place of you don't want to give them a taste of freedom. And as we mentioned, cycling represents and represented a certain kind of freedom.
Yeah, and a simple bicycle therefore becomes this huge ingredient in a bubbling cauldron of what this population wants and what they're told they cannot do. So no voting, no higher education. Let's keep in mind that it wasn't until the nineteen seventies or so that women in the United States were allowed to have credit cards, which is weird. Check out our episode on that from a few months or years back. We've been at this for a while.
Which is kind of funny.
It's sort of a funny concession too, because it's not like credit cards are like the best thing for anybody to have, especially you know, folks who are using them to achieve spending power above their means.
Shout out to Edward Burnees, also involved in women's suffrage as a way to sell cigarettes.
That's what I'm saying. It's sort of like a little bit of a self serving concession.
One hundred percent. And so at this time in the eighteen nineties, of course, women were not allowed the same privileges as dudes. So you couldn't vote, you could have very difficult time gain the higher education, your job opportunities are quite limited.
At the end of the day.
American law enshrine, like the legal decision of this country was that if you were a woman and you were married, which of course they wanted you to be married, then you would have no legal identity distinct from your husband. You had to do the child and household stuff. The UK tried some soft propaganda with this by calling women the angel of the house, So why would she ever go outside? This is where we enter what we call.
The new woman. Yeah, we don't want her to think that she can have it all.
A feminist ideal in the eighteen nineties was really represented as an educated, social, active, very independent woman that was dubbed coined by feminists Sarah Grand The New Woman in eighteen ninety four and the safety bike really hit the scene at an important moment for the new woman where this concept challenged current cultural and gender norms along with a lot of other things that were happening kind of
in lockstep like the Bloomers. The new woman had economic independence, held a job, professional roles, could be highly educated, had personal freedom, was physically fit and active, enjoyed playing sports right alongside the men. All of these things that were supported and cultivated by the bicycle and having access.
To yeah yeah, And this idea of the new woman goes across socioeconomic Boundarieseople who are working on the factory floor, people who are doing what they called pink collar work office jobs, the feminine equivalent of a white collar job. These folks could all be the new woman and safeties. The bikes were designed with a lady's full dress at the time in mind, so we said, look, the skirts are going to get tangled. People are going to catch
a header. This is non ideal. Cycling didn't just encourage social freedom, it encouraged physical freedom through changes in women's fashion. This is where we talked about Bloomers. We mentioned that corsets were cartoonishly restricting, and a lot of skirts had these long trains like what you might see in a wedding today, and dresses with petticoats were heavy as heck. A person's daily dress, not even the fancy one at this time, could weigh twenty five pounds, so you know,
you know, these people had to wear that stuff. Their hamstrings were jacked. Man, my hammies, Yeah they were barking. Can your hammies bark your dogs? Whichever, but yeah, twenty five pounds. A lot of the wire or the frames.
Of these these dresses, the hoop type skirts, they were made of iron and were incredibly heavy. Just the actual kind of undercarriage, I think is what they would call it. In eighteen fifty one, Amelia Bloomer, who I mentioned previously, from New York, along with Elizabeth Katie Stanton, incredibly important feminist activists, popularize this new fashion, the short dress over loose trousers similar to pants, but they were meant to be worn underneath dresses. Of course, the bloomer not to
be too redundant, but they were. I don't think we quite got to this incredibly controversial because they were just too much like pants.
Ben They're too much like pants.
And while all this conversation is happening, more and more people are picking up Bloomers. Maybe it is for a larger goal, maybe it's activism, but as Maria points out, and I agree with her here, they probably just wanted to get out of those heavy, those cartoonishly heavy skirts.
And years later, and also just to add, they were initially kind of more designed as undergarments, and so there was a modesty concern here, you know, from the patriarchy, I guess, saying that they're, oh, you're wearing underwear out in public.
Yeah, in eighteen This all happened in eighteen fifty one. As we said, So if we returned back to the eighteen nineties, what we see is that a lot of women who were fans of bicycling, again, most of them at that point are going to be pretty wealthy and pretty white. They adopted the Bloomers because it was just more practical, but it was still highly controversial. This is the thing, partially, this is a big part of why bicycles advanced women's rights in the United States. It meant
that you could move without a chaperone. It meant that you could travel by yourself, You could decide where you wanted to go. If you look at a suffragist like Francis Willard, you'll see quotes that read the following quote. I begin to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world. And there's a poetry to that.
No question, And it's something that I think we've been describing all along the way, even in our own.
Relationships with bicycles, and how they can still be a little bit of a sticking point to people today who are like, who do you think you are out there and enjoying the world, you know, moving around without having to be stuck in gridlock traffic. So the safety bike afford a woman a socially acceptable way to Also to our earlier point, b outside the home in what had been a male dominated space. Now they're out there, we're out here, and they were doing it on two wheels.
Enter the bad guys. Okay, the culture war begins. Why they said happy holidays. These people basically yelled, what about Christmas? There was no shortage of tin plate propped up experts quote unquote who would who would vociferously oppose the idea of women on bikes? And they said, there are two reasons these are so dumb. There are two reasons are one, what if she takes aheader, she's going to be permanently disfigured. No one's going to marry her. And then two, which
I think is the most ridiculous one. They were like, guys, look at the seats. These women may be having Orgasmsay right, bikes.
Oh dear heavens, how dare.
How a lady have a good time in the United States?
I mean, you know, given the puritanical kind of bent of the time, I could see how ladies straddling a thing in public could be a victim of something like the male gaze, This idea of like, oh my gosh, this is scandalous, but it's not.
Really.
Most of these issues are not women's problems. It's problems men have with women, and it's oftentimes because of how much it threatens them, either you know, financially in terms of their level of power and control, or oftentimes sexually.
Yeah, sorry, bro, it turns out your wife's bike is better than you are at police here. That was like the hidden concern there, and it was such a trumped up malarchy thing for people to pretend to be worried about. And doctors at the time were in hot debate in public media about whether there are health benefits or harm from bicycling. Some said it cured all manner of things, and they were probably they were right ish. They were wrong about some of it. They were right ish about
a lot. It's great for it's great for staying in shape in a low impact way. But they said, look like that means it helps with obesity, heart disease, vericose veins. But they also said bikey will cure your anemia and your asthma and your melancholia.
Well, I would agree with melancholia frankly. I mean, this is this idea of it just being a cure for the blues. Sometimes getting out there and feeling the wind in your hair and all that and having that sense of freedom can remedy those kinds of feelings. Melancholia was of course, kind of a catch all term for just the sads back in a time where they really truly didn't have much understanding of men health. But I would argue that that's true. Maybe some of the more specific
quote nut doesn't make sense there. And when we say the medical community was divided, I think we can say it was divided between those members who had their hearts in the right place and then the quack sector who seems to be on board with big Man.
Yes, yeah, the the other bad guys.
Right, these are our.
Technically qualified doctors or their pundits, the Tucker Carlson's of the day. They would say this is not a healthy exercise for women, for the angels of the house. Bicycle face is a medical condition that happens to women who bit too much because when they are when they are biking they're exercising, their faces wrinkle up and it makes them nervous and exhausted, and it makes them look ugly a kages aka smile more. It's a totally made up condition,
but the symptoms were described in detail. Those symptoms being stuff like permanent facial disfigurement, similar to when your parents may have said, don't make that face. Your face might stay that way forever. That comes from this bicycle face thing. Yeah, Maria titled the document today. I like to call it resting bicycle face, a precursor to the other RBF resting bitch face, which is a very pejorative thing. That is
the root of that whole smile more thing. It's this idea that women owe you some sign of affection or positive whatever.
It's just it's dumb and it persists.
M and then other symptoms would include flushed faces, you know, like the faces you make when you're exercising, bulgie eyes, clinched jaws, a general expression of weariness.
Yeah, to get from exertion, right.
Yeah, And they never applied this bicycle face idea to the dudes.
Oh, there's so many examples of this stuff, and check out episodes of stuff man've never told you about some of these topics as well. They've they've covered this over the years, the idea of like the wandering womb and like all of these you know, hysterical women and all of this. There's a lot of smear campaigns specifically directed by the health community at women over the years to justify some pretty gnarly treatment of it.
This ultimately ends up being a moral panic, an outbreak of again, a culture war time tale as old as time. It's an example of fake health scares that were used to fight against social change by people who were happy with the status quo because they were at the top. There were other imaginary diseases when bicycle face obviously seemed malarchy, there were things like what they called cayphosis bicyclarum by by one more type cayphosis bicyclis sterum cyclist spine.
Yeah, that's right.
They did warn that cycling often left women vulnerable to other general health problems such as graves disease and appendicitis. Yeah, there was a publication on the BMJ that published an article describing how bicycling could worsen chess problems because of the position that you had to ride in, cause urethritis and should be avoided by any woman suffering from pelvic mischief.
That's my favorite term of the day, pelvic mischief.
And again we already mentioned this notion that it could be a way that a woman could pleasure herself, which you know, a God forbid and be ridiculous, that's very inconvenient for the purposes of riding a bike. I don't think anyone's out there you know, trying to get frisky on a bicycle scene.
Right. I want to be very diplomatic, folks, because we are a family show. But I'm we're going to share this quotation with you about the orgasm concern and Noel Max, I just cannot think that whoever was writing this was having a little pervy time in their own mind. Here's the quote. So off, Mike, I did a reading of this that was too controversial.
So we're just going to give.
You the words is written. But I hold to what I'm saying without any acting or interpretation or intonation. This is a really creepy thing for these guys to write, they said, quote. The saddle can be tilted in every
bicycle as desired. In this way, a girl could by carrying the front peak or pommel high, or by relaxing the stretched leather in order to let it form a deep like concavity which would fit itself snugly over the entire volva and reach up in front, bring about constant friction over the glytorus and labia.
Yo. Yeah, I don't know I wrote that.
I don't know wrote well, and thankfully you know the the snowflake men of the day were ultimately sort of calmed down a bit with the release of something called the anatomical saddle, which I can only imagine is something like a banana seat or just like a broader seat. That seemed to allay some of these fears that the patriarchy had and make them settle down a little bit.
And we are more than happy to report that, thankfully this moral panic of the bicycle face was debunked as it should have been. It shouldn't have started, but it was revealed to be or understood to be ultimately a self limiting fake condition. And again, thankfully, by the Earth nineteen hundreds, it wasn't something that people were worried about.
Nah.
Doctor Sarah Hackett Stevenson, a prominent Chicago doctor, was among the group who finally, you know, put the nail in this particular coffin dismissing the condition. She wrote in the uh, well, to be fair, the phrenological journal, right, which is its own thing, of course, Yeah, phrenology, not quoit and also quackery.
But you know, her heart was in the right place.
And maybe this was just a popular journal at the time, because this was something that was very widely studied, you know, in eighteen ninety seven that any trace of such a quote face would be temporary, okay and completely gone once a woman was proficient in riding her bike. Okay, well, yeah she got there, but a little circuitous route right
ish mm hmm yep. She also wrote that cycling was, in fact an excellent exercise for women, and the lost beauty of many delicate women may be recovered if they ride.
They get out and exercise.
I guess that's true, the lost beauty of many delicate women.
Yeah, I may be recovered. I don't agree with the framing.
Great everybody loves a glow up and we also, uh, we love this story because we are all three big fans of bikes and cycling. Thank you again for joining us today, folks. We can't wait for you to hit the road or the belt line or the trail with us on some future episodes. Also, big, big thanks to mister Max Williams. Max, do you have a bicycle? I don't want to put you on blast, but I'm curious.
I actually do not right now?
I am. I'm not the big bike guy, which is funny, Zs is a very big bike guy himself. Okay, all right, id of want to petting farthing after this episode, I can.
See you rocking a bone shaker here, elies Max he tried to petting farthing.
Big fakes, of.
Course, to Jonathan Strickland, aka the Quizter, who is probably the guy who will sell you a gently used penny Farley.
M m yeah, he's got a garage full of them. Huge thanks to research associate Maria for knocking out this banger research brief for us A J Mohammad Jacobs, the Puzzler, Chris Frosciotis Anddie's Jeff Co's here in spirit, the aforementioned cycling enthusiast Alex Williams who composed.
Arthy Beautiful Yes, big big thanks also to doctor Rachel Big Spinach Lance, as well as the rude dudes of Ridiculous Crime. If you dig us, especially our recent Dalli episode, then you will love them. So hie thee to Thy podcast platform of choice and check out some amazing stories they have to share as well. Most importantly, thank you to Noel.
Hey to you as well, Ben. We'll see you next time, folks.
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