Riding Out of Bounds: Women Bicyclists' Embodied Medical Authority

Abstract

With its wide circulation and its resistance to old-fashioned morality, the popular magazine provided late nineteenth-century American women a location within which to counter doctors' long-held views of their physical frailty. In articles promoting the bicycle as an agent of women's health, nonmedically trained women countered medical commonplaces of women's limited energies and need for constant doctor scrutiny. Instead, they posited a renewable, self-governing female body capable of taking on both the bicycle and the challenges of the new century. In doing so, they influenced doctors' perspectives on women's bodies from outside professional boundaries.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewers, Barbara Heifferon and Richard Marback, for their very helpful suggestions on two previous drafts of this article.

²As Wells notes, in 1898 women doctors comprised five percent of the profession—a number not surpassed until the 1970s (8). Following the American Medical Association-sponsored Flexnor Report in 1910, medical schools adopted a more rigorous and standardized curriculum, forcing women's medical colleges to close their doors for lack of financial support. As a result, women's enrollment in medical schools decreased dramatically (9).

³Susan Wells' book-length Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine considers a wide range of women doctors' rhetorical practices and strategies for self-representation. Carolyn Skinner's Rhetoric Review article, meanwhile, examines women doctors' efforts to communicate with public audiences more specifically.

⁴As David Herlihy and others have suggested, the Ordinary enjoyed great popularity among young middle- and upper-class American men during the 1880s. Riders reveled in the danger of learning to ride and racing, and participated in often exclusive clubs. Women's use of the Ordinary was minimal, although some women did ride large tricycles that allowed them to retain their long skirts and sit low to the ground. The tricycle was conceived largely as a companion to the high-wheeled Ordinary.

⁵Although some women practiced medicine without official training, by “nonmedically trained” women I do not refer to these individuals. Rather, I refer to women authors and bicycle enthusiasts who did not practice medicine and who were not trained to do so, as far as I know, but who nonetheless offered their perspectives on health and on women's physical capacities with respect to the bicycle.

⁶As culturally rooted assumptions that circulate not just among “experts” but among the general public who are guided by “common sense,” commonplaces like those that late nineteenth-century women bicyclists were countering require little elaboration because of their apparent common-sense validity within the cultural context in which they flourish. As Sharon Crowley notes, commonplaces in modern society take the form of “ideologies” and are marked chiefly by their “wide dispersal among members of a community” (70). The commonplace of women's comparative physical frailty to men, for example, was accepted and promoted not only within the practices of nineteenth-century doctors, but also within the education, the arguments, and the daily lived experiences of American men and women (Vertinsky 41). Similarly, the commonplace that women's energies were scarce and that their depletion would negatively affect their reproductive capabilities prevailed within many sectors of society, authorizing opposition to increases in women's physical and intellectual activity.

⁷Both The Nineteenth Century and Scribner's Magazine within which Kenealy and Roosevelt wrote classify as “house” magazines.

⁸Susan Wells notes that in 1910 the proportion of American women in the profession reached six percent (9).