Upcoming exhibit:


Bicycles and Bloomers: Women’s Emancipation and the Bicycle


Emily Darman Allen, Director of Exhibits and Graphic Design


T


he bicycle’s Golden Age during the 1890s


proved to be an important milestone in challenging the definition of gender roles in Europe and the United States.


The Ladies Hobby, published in London, May 21, 1819, hand-colored copper engraving, courtesy of Pryor Dodge Collection


The classical Victorian style of dress exaggerated the female form. Backed by medical opinion of the period, “loose” women were those who went un-corseted, while “straight-laced” women followed normative aesthetic and moral codes. But as the bicycle grew in popularity and respectability, women began to integrate into the “man’s world”, riding tricycles, tandems and side-saddle velocipedes. With this introduction women took to the roads, discovering freedom and independence. Maria E. Ward stated in Bicycling for Ladies (1896):


Riding the wheel, our own powers are revealed to us… you have conquered a new world, and exultingly you take possession of it. You feel at once the keenest sense of responsibility; you become alert, active, quick-sighted, and keenly alive as well to the rights of others as to what is due yourself. To the many who wish to be actively at work in the world, the opportunity has come.


Prior to the 1880s women were permitted to ride a horse sidesaddle but prohibited from participating in most sports. Doctors warned of potential harm to women’s reproductive organs, instead encouraging the use of corsets claiming that it strengthened otherwise weak bodies. Restraining garments took the form of


long and heavy skirts and dresses, sometimes with hoops, trains, corsets and high-heeled shoes.


Only when women began riding tricycles did a movement pick up in earnest. Founded in 1888, the Rational Dress Society encouraged women to abandon their corsets and cumbersome weighty skirts claiming that the freshness of youth was eroded by the “tyranny of fashion.” In the first issue of The Rational Dress Society’s Gazette, April 1888, the Society’s secretary, Mrs. Carpenter-Fenton, declared:


The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that


either deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to 2 www.coronadohistory.org


injure the health. It protests against wearing of tightly-fitting corsets; of high-heeled or narrow-toed boots and shoes; of heavily weighted skirts, as rendering healthy exercise almost impossible; and of all tie-down cloaks or crinolettes of any kind as ugly and deforming. The maximum weight of underclothing (without shoes), approved by the Rational Dress Society, does not exceed seven pounds.


The fashion industry for women’s cycling enjoyed a small boom. First designed in 1850 by Libby Miller, the bloomer was made famous by her cousin Amelia Bloomer who championed the Turkish trouser that was gathered about the ankles and worn under a skirt. The bloomer became a symbol of the rational dress movement at the end of the nineteenth century and various forms of more practical dress evolved.


“Bicycles and Bloomers: Women’s Emancipation and the Bicycle” will open on June 25 to our members at a private reception and June 25 to our members, June 26 for the public and run through December 2010. The exhibit features original objects from the Pryor Dodge Collection and the Coronado Historical Association including an 1885 adult tricycle, lithographic posters, prints and paper ephemera, historical photographs and vintage bloomers illustrating the cycling activity of women circa 1819 through the bicycle’s Golden Age in the 1890s in Europe and the United States.


Upcoming Lecture


The Fall and Rise of Carrier Aviation: 1946-1956


Presented by Karl Zingheim, Historian, USS Midway 2 p.m., Saturday, April 10, 2010 Museum Lecture Hall


What brought about the near-extinction of carrier aviation and what brought it back in the jet age? Karl Zingheim returns to the Coronado Historical Association to present a topic he’s been researching that enlighten us to the development of carrier aviation. Karl Zingheim, a graduate of the Naval Academy and Staff Historian at the USS Midway Museum will present his research in a lecture illustrated with historical photos from the collections of the USS Midway Museum and the Coronado Museum of History and Art. The registration fee for each lecture is $10 for members, $15 for non-members. For reservations, please either call the CHA Office, 619-435-7242 for your credit card charge or send your check with your name, address, phone number, and number of tickets and date/ time of lecture to CHA, 1100 Orange Ave., Coronado, CA 92118. All proceeds benefit the Coronado Historical Association to help fulfill the mission of encouraging and promoting the appreciation, knowledge and understanding of Coronado’s unique art, architecture, history and other historical resources.


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