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In the 1890s, reporters throughout the country published article after article docu- menting and debating the new bicycle craze. They were particularly concerned about the ramifications of women's bicycling on Victorian gender norms; many worried that bicycling would limit women's reproductive ability and turn them into masculine, radical political agitators unencumbered by traditional gender norms. Dress was a par- ticularly explosive aspect of this debate, and the pants-wearing woman cyclist, symbol- izing the most threatening potential of the bicycle, was a common image in popular press cartoons that mocked women's activism (Marks 175). In 1894, a reporter for the New York Times summed up the disgust many Americans felt about this New Woman: "if there is one thing I hate . . . it is a masculine woman . . . She has made a half-way sort of creature of herself. She can't be a man, and she is a disgrace as a woman" ("Woman's wheeling dress"). It would be understandable to assume that a close-mind- ed male journalist who was ignorant of women's beliefs about their cycling practices wrote this particular article. According to popular accounts, women's bicycling in the 1890s was personally and politically empowering for women. Sue Macy represent this sentiment in her recent history Wheels of Change, and some readers may be familiar with Susan B. Anthony's often-cited statement that bicycling has "done more to eman- cipate women than anything else in the world" (qtd. in Bly 10). Yet, this Times article was not written by a male journalist hoping to undermine women's efforts to transfer gender norms. The author was in fact Mary Sargent Hopkins, a leading advocate for women's cycling and outdoor activities.
Mary Sargent Hopkins was a politically engaged, middle-class woman and an avid cyclist. She developed an extraordinary career by promoting women's exercise and sport in a variety of newspapers and magazines during the 1890s. It may seem counter- intuitive that a nationally known, female sports columnist of the 1890s would use the popular press as a platform to disparage women athletes who challenged gender roles and evoke such conservatism. But Hopkins believed the majority of women bicyclists were not gender-bending radicals or "New Women," but respectable reformers work- ing to improve women's lives within existing gender...