The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Women’s liberation through bicycling

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

For many, the nineties were a time of political advancement and financial success. The economy was doing well, failed policies from previous administrations were being turned back, manufacturing was on the increase, and progress was the buzz-word in board rooms and parlors.

This national excitement had something, more than a little, to do with the fact that the 1890s were also the height of the bicycle boom in the United States. In 1897 alone, approximately three hundred manufacturers in the US sold more two million bicycles, doubling production from the previous year.

The bicycle had been invented only thirty years earlier, and the constant stream of improvements to its design was a celebrated sign of progress. The bicycle’s adoption by women of the era made the bicycle literally and metaphorically a vehicle of social change.

In the 1930s, local newspaper columnist Wyatt T. Dixon wrote a few articles reflecting on bicycles’ popularity in 1887. B.L. Duke and Company’s furniture store rented high wheelers (the kind of bikes with a front wheel nearly as tall as the rider and much smaller rear wheel) for ten cents an hour. If you could afford it, renting bicycles and learning to ride the wobbly contraptions was a popular form of entertainment in 1887. Watching the cyclists fall off the bikes was equally entertaining for the crowd that formed every weekend.

Cycling, as Dixon reports it, was a man’s activity.

dowd.jpgSource: Kostyu, Joel A. and Frank A. Kostyu. Durham: a Pictorial History. Norfolk, Va.: Donning, 1978 — purchase the book here.

Between 1887 and 1890, the number of cyclists in the US doubled. “The vast majority of new purchasers, many of whom were women, favored the new ‘safety bicycle,’” says David Herlihy in Bicycle. The safety bicycle resembles what we now think of as a bicycle: two wheels of equal size with a chain-driven rear axle and lever-operated brakes. Its invention and mass production propelled cycling’s popularity.

In a photograph dating to roughly 1895, young Durhamite Mamie Dowd poses proudly with an Overman Victoria bicycle. The Victoria, Overman’s drop frame woman’s model, was a fixed gear safety bicycle outfitted with solid rubber tires. According to The Smithsonian Institution, “the drop frame bicycle was developed so that women could ride while wearing a long skirt. It’s adoption greatly increased the popularity of the bicycle, and helped make cycling a popular sport for women, as well as, a means of transportation.”

Peter Zheutlin echoes the point in his biography of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world; “a woman with a bicycle no longer had to depend on a man for transportation.”

No wonder then that in 1896 Susan B. Anthony said that bicycling had done more than anything else to emancipate women.

durhamelectriclightingco_1890.jpgSource: Kostyu, Joel A. and Frank A. Kostyu. Durham: a Pictorial History. Norfolk, Va.: Donning, 1978 — purchase the book here.

Dowd claimed to be the first woman in Durham to own a bicycle, though the authenticity of her claim is challenged by another photograph. In the second, two men and a woman pose in front of the Durham Electric Lighting Company in 1890. The two men stand in suits and top hats, while the woman wears a Victorian dress and hat. Notably, she is sitting astride a bicycle. The photo itself is a celebration of two major innovations of the time: the bicycle as well as Durham’s first electricity provider.

We know from accounts that conservatives of the time saw the bicycle as a symbol of unwelcome social change. While it was a celebrated technological innovation and an admirable source of amusement for men (and even boys), the bicycle’s role in women’s liberation kept it mired in controversy.

In his 1901 memoir, traditionalist James Battle Avirett reminisces antebellum values and derides the bicycle for ruining “the grace of woman’s attractive movement.” His comments parallel a June 6, 1895 article in Statesville’s daily, The Landmark, which notes that while “the number of women who ride bicycles is growing with great rapidity… even in the best and prettiest of costumes, no woman looks dignified while riding a bicycle.”

For conservatives, what was unwelcome about women cycling had as much to do with the resulting changes in women’s clothing as it had to do with these so-called ‘new women’ traveling on their own.

Zheutlin explains that “cycling required a more practical, rational form of dress, and the large billowing skirts and corsets started to give way to bloomers.”

In short, when it came to women, “cycling, and the dress reform that accompanied it, challenged traditional gender norms,” says Zheutlin.

Durham embraced the progress perhaps more easily than other cities its size. Women were working in tobacco factories as early as the 1880s, and local historian Jean Anderson notes that in 1896 “continuing efforts toward independence” led Durham women to create their own literary and social clubs, splintering away from male-dominated groups.

morehead1.jpgImage courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

A third photograph from the era, this one also from 1895, shows a young boy and girl straddling bicycles in the driveway of the Morehead House on Duke Street.

Despite its high cost, the bicycle’s popularity transcended class. “Hundreds of thousands in the United States,” says Youth’s Companion magazine in the summer of 1896, “saved ‘every spare penny’ to buy a wheel,” and to the detriment of other businesses. As these photographs of turn of the century Durham show, bicycle fever transcended age and race as well.

Although it is unclear whether Dowd was the first woman in Durham to have a bike, later in life she did become the first judge of Durham’s Juvenile Court. Whether her bicycling days had anything to do with her later successful social reforms is up to you.

The photographs mentioned in this column are part of Bull City Bicycles, a month-long exhibit of bicycle related photography on display at Bull City Arts Collaborative, 401 Foster Street. Visit http://www.bullcityarts.org/ for more details.

This column is part of a ongoing research project into the history of Durham’s cycling community. If you have anything to share (photographs, memoirs, family lore, or personal stories) about cycling in Durham, I would love to hear from you.

The Outspokin’ Cyclist: World needs your old bicycles

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

Mark in Cape Coast, GhanaIn Ghana, the availability of a reliable bicycle turns a 2 hour walk to school into a 25 minute ride.

In Guatemala, it means that someone who previously could not carry their wares to a market now has a way.

In Namibia, where specially equipped bicycles become pedal-powered ambulances, it can be the difference between life and death.

“Bikes empower people to change their lives,” says Merywen Wigley. As an HIV/AIDS professional working in international health, Wigley has witnessed personally the difference two wheels can make.

An avid cyclist before ever stepping foot in Africa, she was moved by seeing healthcare workers traversing rural Zambia by bike to deliver medications and check on patients.

She learned that many communities in the developing world receive their bicycles as donations, salvaged castaways from countries like the United States. Since 2002, Wigley has volunteered with Bikes for the World.

According to their website, Bikes for the World’s central mission is to collect unwanted bicycles and related material in the United States and deliver it at low cost to community development programs assisting the poor in developing countries or in the Washington DC metropolitan area. As much as possible, Bikes for the World (BFW) uses the donated bicycles to help set-up self-sustaining bicycle repair operations which can make enough money to pay the shipping costs for subsequent container shipments of donated bicycles. Since 1995, BFW shipped more than 30,000 bikes overseas. Wigley and other Durham residents are starting a new Triangle chapter.

On Saturday, March 29th, local BFW volunteers will see how many bicycles they can pack into a 24-foot UHaul. They hope to get at least 200.

To do that, they need your help.

That Saturday is a Triangle-wide collection drive. In a parking lot in Research Triangle Park, volunteers will be receiving your donations, making a few mechanical adjustments to each bike for more compact shipping, and loading the bikes onto a truck bound for Washington, DC. From there, BFW will load the cycles into a shipping container bound for either Africa or Latin America.

Road bikes, mountain bikes, kids’ bikes, or adult bikes all make great donations. BFW asks that you please donate whole bikes rather than parts and frames. But a bike with flat tires, broken cables, or a rusty chain is fine. “As long as everything on the bike turns, we can use it,” Dan Gatti explains.

“We also ask for a $10 donation with each bike to offset the cost of shipping.” It costs $20 to get a bike from the collection point to the community in the developing world. “Bikes for the World pays half, and we ask the folks who donate a bike to pay the other half,” Magill says.

“Besides,” says Marcus Rogers, “anyone who has ever boxed and shipped their own bike knows that $10 is a deal.”

Jack Warman, a member of the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, decided to get involved with BFW after hearing a recent BBC radio-documentary on the Bicycle Empowerment Network in Namibia. “Through groups like BFW,” says Warman, “you can take something that we, who are extraordinarily spoiled, would throw away and turn it into something that can change someone’s life.”

Emily Dings agrees. “Bikes have been a great avenue for me to find meaningful activities, and this seems like another one of those meaningful activities,” she says.

Meaningfulness also ruled the day in a recent test of creative mettle.

Software giant Google and bicycle component manufacturer Shimano teamed up to sponsor a contest challenging inventors to create the next radical shift in cycling technology. Innovate or Die, the contest’s name a harbinger of the high stakes on inventiveness in the age of global climate change, drew entries that range the spectrum from the next super-light frame material to the successor to the derailleur.

The winner, though, is simpler. It’s a bike that stores water and filters it while you pedal.

That such a unpretentious, utilitarian bike won this international contest of ingenuity serves as a reminder that bicycles are tools as much as they are toys. They are vehicles with a long history of liberation through simplicity.

As Warman muses, “bicycles can change the world.” Read more

The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Durham man to pedal for peace across Israel

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

When Martin Luther King said that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice, he had in mind the idea that lasting, real peace is possible only when we actively take responsibility for it.

Marv Axelrod is tired of hearing promises of peace in the Middle East only to be later disappointed by the dissolution of dialogue. He’s tired of all the news coming out of Israel being about conflict.

Axelrod is not someone who complains about something he is not willing to help solve. “I want to do something rather than just sit around and wait for someone else to fix it,” says the seventy-two year old.

This May, he is planning to pedal a bicycle three hundred miles across the Negev Desert in Israel to promote peace. While he has never ridden a bike in desert conditions before, Axelrod is a busy man by anyone’s standards.

When he retired from the New York City board of education fourteen years ago, a friend told Axelrod that the key to growing older would be to remain active.

The high school English teacher moved to Durham and quickly got involved in his new community. In the time he’s lived here, Axelrod has taught ESL courses through Durham Tech and Duke’s Continuing Education program, has made presentations for the Durham Arts Council, he has taught English in Latin America, he performs for retirement homes with the Village Players, and writes articles for the Menorah, the monthly newspaper of the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish Federation.

“I also do programs for the Carolina Health And Humor Association (HAHA),” says Axelrod. “It’s Jewish humor. It’s stand up comedy; but sometimes I get tired and sit down.”

axelrod.jpgFrank Ferrell of Ninth Street Bakery thinks he first met Axelrod the way he meets many people: when Axelrod came in to Ferrell’s shop as a customer. “We have a similar sense of humor,” says Ferrell, “and he’s raising money for a good cause.” Ferrell has pitched in to help Axelrod meet his fundraising goal of $3600.

Riding his bike this summer is a way to keep moving, too, to remind others that age is not a barrier to staying active, Axelrod says.

He’s been a cyclist since he got his first bike, his uncle’s heavy Schwinn with a horn on the handlebars, when he was Bar Mitzvahed at thirteen. As he grew older, he developed a taste for longer rides. After retiring in New York and moving to North Carolina, he completed both the MS150 and the Ride Across NC in the late 90s.

He’s no stranger to riding a bike in a foreign land — he and his wife have biked around Holland, Spain, and Nicaragua — but he’s never had to raise so much money nor felt so committed to the cause.

The 2008 Israel Ride is a fully supported benefit ride, raising money for the Arava Institute. Arava is an academic, environmental studies and leadership institute situated in the Negev Desert. The institute welcomes Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, and other Arab students and researchers to study regional environmental issues. “If peace is possible in the Middle East, then we have to work together,” says Axelrod. “If people can come together, survive in the desert, learn how to get the desert to bloom and desalinate water, then there can be peace.”

For more information

Israel Ride
http://www.israelride.org

Arava Institute
http://www.arava.org/

To support Axelrod, you can donate through the Israel Ride website (choose Sponsor a Rider and search Marv Axelrod’s name) or send a check payable to the Arava Institute to:

Marv Axelrod
116 Brook Lane
DURHAM, 27712