29 Jun

Women’s Six Day Bicycle Races

I’m more and more convinced that my new heroine will be a bicycle racer, so I’ve been looking up about women’s racing at the end of the nineteenth century. There is, in fact, a book on the subject of women in six-day bicycle races — but it doesn’t come out until October 2018! I even sent an email to the author in hopes of snagging an early review copy, but no dice. He did email me a copy of an article he’s recently written for Michigan History magazine, which was helpful in that it explains the women’s races were sprints, compared to the men’s six-day races.

For male cyclists, the six-day race was just that: riding as long as you were awake for six days. It was an endurance event to the extreme. For the women, it was apparently an hour in the afternoon and two hours in the evening, which allowed their races to focus on speed and coincidentally be more exciting for spectators.

Understanding how the races worked is one part of the puzzle, but I’m still missing info. Namely, who was racing, when, and where? There’s a bit of a list at sixday.org and another at 6dayracing.ca, but the women’s information is scanty and earlier than I’m looking for. So I’m combing through the Library of Congress’s online newspaper database and making a similar list of women in six day races. And if I’m doing the work already, I might as well share it.

I started by searching for Tillie Anderson, easily the era’s most famous female racer (she’s even earned herself a children’s book) and then doing secondary searches on her named competitors. I got to about forty races and over fifty named competitors. Because the races last for so long, it’s hard to tell quickly if a news report is talking about a new race or is a slightly delayed account of a previous race. The list may therefore contract as well as expand. It’s a Google spreadsheet, so you can click here to view it. I’ve added in some notes as I found interesting tidbits in the new articles that were longer than just race results: dogs on the track, riots, and wardrobe malfunctions are a few of the newsworthy mishaps!

06 Jun

Victorian women learning to ride a bike

More on women’s cycling from old books and journals. There are two popular topics regarding women and bikes: method of riding and choice of dress. Throughout the 1890s the debate rages on skirts vs bloomers/knickerbockers, what sort of cut to the skirts, bifurcated or not, how to keep your skirt out of the wheels, best bikes with skirtguards… There’s a lot of concern about looking unladylike while riding a bicycle. For the lady who did want to ride, how would she get through the awkward phase of learning to ride gracefully without embarrassing herself publicly? By attending a cycling school or academy, where a (presumably male) teacher would assist her with balance behind sheltering walls. As you might expect, there were still writers ready to make fun of the female student of the bike, as in the poem below, which I found in a magazine for Locomotive Engineers. I’m considering making my heroine a female bicycle instructor, as she could surely provide a more friendly experience than that described in this poem!

At the Bicycle Academy

‘Twas at the female cycling school,
Where bloomer costumes arc the rule;
And fairy forms in trousers hid,
Essay the bike as she is rid.

A rare and radiant vision she!
A dream! a song! a rhapsody!
To whom none other there was like,
Came forth to tame the festive bike!

She cast about a bashful glance,
Gazed at her wiry steed askance;
Then eyed her bifurcated skirt,
And wondered if a tumble hurt.

Then at the master’s stern command,
She grasped her steed with trembling hand;
A gasp, a sigh with anguish pent,
A bounce, a boost, and up she went.

Prate not to me of dire alarm,
Of fire and floods and martial arms;
For depth of woe there’s nothing like
A frightened female on a bike!

She stuck, she strained, she vainly strove
To make that pesky pedal move;
She pumped, she pushed, turned ghastly white;
And worked both feet with all her might!

And now she starts, she seems to feel
A thrill of life along her wheel!
But, oh! a bump! a zigzag slump!
Girl, bike, spokes, legs, all in a lump!

Reprinted from the New York Evening Sun in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers’ Monthly Journal, Vol XXIX No 3, March, 1895.

29 May

The Bloomer’s Complaint

Here’s another something I ran across while researching bloomers and rational dress: sheet music from 1850 for “The Bloomer’s Complaint: A Very Pathetic Song for Piano Forte”. I’ve typed up the lyrics for easy reading — if you happen to play piano and are interested in the music, it’s right here on Google Books. Personally, I have no ability to read music, but I’m imagining it as ideally performed something like Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster singing at the piano.

Dear me, what a terrible clatter they raise,
Because that old gossip Dame Rumor
Declares, with her hands lifted up in amaze,
That I’m coming out as a Bloomer,
That I’m coming out as a Bloomer.
I wonder how often these men must be told
When a woman a notion once siezes,
However they ridicule, lecture or scold,
She’ll do, after all, as she pleases,
She’ll do, after all, as she pleases.

They know very well that their own fashions change
With each little change of the season,
But Oh! it is “monstrous” and “dreadful” and “strange”
And “out of all manner of reason,”
And “out of all manner of reason”
If we take a fancy to alter our dress,
And come out in style “a la Bloomer,”
To hear what an outcry they make, I confess
Is putting me quite out of humor,
Is putting me quite out of humor.

I’ll come out next week, with a wide Bloomer flat
Of a shape that I fancy will fright them,
I had not intended to go quite to that,
But I’ll do it now, only to spite them,
But I’ll do it now, only to spite them
With my pants “a la Turque” and my skirts two feet long
All fitting of course, most completely
These grumblers shall own after all, they are wrong,
And that I, in a Bloomer, look sweetly,
And that I, in a Bloomer, look sweetly.

22 May

Psycho Ladies Safety Bicycle

I’m finishing up my first historical romance and starting to draft the second in the series, which means I am back into research mode. Book two’s heroine is a cyclist, so I’ve been trying to figure out what she might be wearing — the 1890s is still a period of upheaval in ladies’ fashion, as corsets disappear and “rational dress” appears, and the advent of women’s bicycles leads to debate on where and when it is appropriate for women to wear knickerbockers or should they be riding bikes with drop frames, with nothing for their skirts to get involved in…

Anyway, I was reading an opinion letter in an 1890s magazine and the lady writing mentioned that she and her sisters have all ended up riding the Psycho Ladies’ Safety.

“Safety” is the “safety bicycle” but Psycho Ladies? Really?

Yes, really! Imported from England in 1888 and after, the ladies’ safety bicycle from the Psycho line, manufactured by the Storley Bros. was one of the first ladies’ bikes available in the United States. A search in Google Books brings up two pages of mentions in the late 1880s and 1890s of the Psycho ladies’ safety. For instance, at the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association’s seventeenth triennial exhibition in 1890, W.W. Stall of Boston won a silver medal in the category of “Agricultural Implements and products, carriages, wagons, bicycles, and other vehicles and appliances” with “Bicycles and appurtenances, including New Star Combination Drop-Frame Psycho, Ladies’ Light Roadster Psycho, Ladies’ Extra Light Roadster, Double-Frame Psycho, Coventry Rival Safety, Tremont Safety, Elliott Safety, and others.”

Psycho Ladies’ Safety Bicycle

Sorry, I have to repeat it because I’m so excited that it existed with that name.

Obviously, “psycho” had different connotations at the time. Etymonline tells me that it wasn’t used as a shortening for “psychopathic” until Raymond Chandler used it that way in 1936. If we look at the roots f the word, it’s the Greek term psykhe, meaning “mind, mental; spirit, unconscious.” There’s also the Greek myth of Psyche and Cupid/Eros, a variation on the Beauty and the Beast storyline, in which Psyche is married to a terrible serpent who visits her at night as a handsome man and, after she breaks some rules, she has to complete a number of quests in order to win him back and live happily ever after. I think it’s safe to say that the makers of Psycho bikes had this image in mind,

And not this.

Anyway, the Psycho ladies’ bikes – and there were soon several different options – and ladies’ bikes in general were a big step forward from tricycles, which had earlier been the most accepted form of bicycle for ladies. As one article from 1891 points out, “it was surely not in reason that a presumably robust, lightly-clad man should ride the light-moving fifty-pound bicycle, while the weaker, long-skirted girl was condemned to trundle the hundred-pound tricycle.”

By 1893, manufacturing and technology had improved even on the fifty-pound bicycle option, and Iron Age‘s 1897 history of the women’s bicycle tells us that,

The combination of light steel frame perfectly elastic air tires held on a tough and springy wooden rim makes a bicycle of 25 pounds weight or less to ride which is as near like flying as woman is likely to get in our generation.

Compared to a modern bike, that sounds like, well, a modern bike. I ride a 2013 Trek 520, a steel-framed touring bike, which weighs 27 pounds. Perhaps it would be a little lighter with wooden rims on the wheels!

I still have to decide if my heroine will be riding a Psycho ladies’ safety, which had a drop frame, i.e. no top bar.

This allows it to be ridden more easily while still wearing skirts, but my heroine will be following rational dress and wearing knickerbockers. From this illustration in the novel A Study in Bloomers: Or, The Model New Woman, however, wearing bloomers, or knickerbockers, doesn’t automatically mean a female cyclist would be riding a wheel with a diamond frame.

She’s wearing a velvet suit, which sounds incredibly stylish but hot for actual riding… Obviously I still have more research to do!

20 Dec

The Artist, the Lady and the Tiger

In my reading about the zoo, I learned about the American painter Frederick Stuart Church, who regularly used the animals of the zoo as models. It seems he was quite fond of depicting young ladies in company with big cats. He wrote a rambling illustrated article about his work and experiences for Scribner’s Magazine in December 1893, Vol. XIV, No. 6, which I found entertaining and intriguing.

Excerpts from “An Artist Among Animals,” written and illustrated by F.S. Church

Frederick Stuart Church illustration for Scribner's

I saw a young girl in the lion-house at the Central Park Zoo modeling a tiger. One morning I watched her for some time, and after she got through her work and was about to go, she took a rose from her dress and threw it into the animal. You know some of the cat family are very susceptible to the different odors, and the action of that tiger must have astonished the young girl. There was every expression of animal gladness in the way that he fondled and caressed the flower. I suggested to the young lady that it might be perfectly safe for her to go in the cage, the tiger seemed in such an amiable mood. She seemed half inclined to act on my suggestion and go in, but perhaps it was just as well she didn’t. You can never trust them.

After reading the first bit, which had come up on my search for “Central Park Zoo,” I assumed, as you may have up to this point, that this was a piece about the practice of drawing and sketching live animals, and maybe the exotic options available at the zoo. But Church, as a working artist, took commissions and therefore shares this anecdote.

I have a sketch on my wall–a rough cartoon of a tigress creeping up through the jungle with a most wicked glare in her eye, as if about to spring on a very pretty young woman in diaphanous drapery, who is seated on a bank with her feet in the water, apparently dreaming over a lapful of lotus flowers. That picture was suggested, and an order given to paint it, by a young New England girl, who is, or thought she was, a “reincarnationist.” She was one of the finest specimens of New England beauties I have ever seen, from the best old Puritan and Hugenot stock, her father, a magnificent specimen of manhood, following in the faith of his fathers; but she, in a future state, expected or hoped to take the form of a tigress, and go around eating up good-looking young girls. Queer idea, wasn’t it, and she had such a sweet and sympathetic disposition?I took the order, but do you know I was never able to make that animal take the fatal leap. With a great of persuasion I induced Mr. Conklin, the former careful and thoroughly experienced superintendent at the Central Park Zoo, to allow a tiger to be enraged up to a most desperate point, by having a young bear cub placed dangerously near his cage, and I made lots of studies in movement and expression of that animal’s most ferocious efforts to get at that cub, but it was of no use. I then changed the whole idea, and made a recumbent tigress looking up with a most placid expression into the face of the young woman, who still continued to dream over the lilies. The “reincarnationist” was disgusted, and I sold my “idyl” at a quarter of the price to “another fellow.” That change of expression cost me $750, and should have taught me a lesson, which some of my realistic friends would say served me right.”

Wait, what?

First, what about this New Englander of good Puritan and Hugenot stock casually appropriating ideas of reincarnation????

Second, she sounds like some kind of badass wanting to be reincarnated as a lady-eating tiger.

Third, that was an amazing character sketch of both the lady and the artist.

You can see that I really had to share once I read that bit. There’s more. Church wasn’t just about the drawing of ladies with animals. Apparently he was also about allegory.

Knowledge is Power by Frederick Stuart Church

One of my female critics, who is not in sympathy with my work, was looking the other day at a picture of mine which I call “Knowledge is Power.” It represents a young girl in college gown reading to a lot of tigers. The lady said: “If anyone needs knowledge that girl does, or she wouldn’t be such a stupid fool as to sit among a lot of tigers.” An excellent criticism from her stand-point, but perhaps it is not what I am getting at.

Okay, Church, you don’t understand the feelings of the “reincarnationist” and your female friends may not understand your philosophy either. I guess it’s a draw? At least you can idealize the nature of the female cats.

I paint the lioness much more than I do the lion. Probably few notice the difference, but I use the tigress in all my pictures in preference to the male. There is something in the female of the cat species, particularly, that appeals to much more than the male. She has certain lines, movements, alertness and quickness of perception, with a sort of you-had-better-look-out expression, which I don’t see in the male. I often think of that tigress I read of in a report of the London Zoo, who, accompanied by her two cubs, stealthily approached in the middle of the night a small temporary board shanty, where some native East Indian railroad workmen were sleeping. Leaving her cubs at the door, she stole in, grabbed one of the sleeping men, and made off with him before the horrified occupants could realize the situation.

Just think the peculiar intelligence shown not only in her successful raid, but in her instructions to her cubs, who she made wait outside for her while she did her terrible work!

This bit put me in mind of Kipling’s 1911 poem The Female of the Species, which concludes most stanzas with “The female of the species is more deadly than the male” and posits that females are fierce because they have an unshakeable instinct to protect their young, while males can be logical. For a reply to that, I recommend Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman’s reply More Females of the Species.

But the poetry is a tangent away from F.S. Church. My imagination is particularly fired, not by his ideas about the females of the species, or by the allegorical meanings of the women he painted, but by the women he describes interacting with: the female painter, the critic, and, of course, the “reincarnationist.”

I had been thinking to make one of my heroines involved in spiritualism or vaudeville in some way, and the idea of a young lady of New England who wishes she were a tigress seems like it could play into that beautifully. There is something there about women looking for more expansive role in society and not wanting to be confined by the feminine ideals of the time. Why be the allegorical beauty reading to the tigers when you could be the tiger? Her explicit desire is to be a tigress who will “go around eating up good-looking young girls”! She seems ready to completely destroy and discard the current female role. Definitely a suffragist. Perhaps ready to smash the patriarchy as well. I’ll just have to be careful that she doesn’t cross over into Spirit Weavers Gathering territory…

You can see more examples of Church’s work on the Wikimedia Commons, as well as on artnet.com and americangallery19th.wordpress.com. In addition to ladies and big cats, he also painted ladies with polar bears or flamingos, or even by themselves without animal companions.

12 Dec

The First Woman in the New York Yacht Club

For my historical romance in progress, I have a scene set on a steam yacht. I went looking for info about such vessels and settled upon a particular historical boat to use as a model in the scene – the Dungeness, owned by Mrs. Lucy Carnegie, widow of Pittsburgh steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s brother Thomas.

As I looked for more info about the boat, I ran across this wonderful article under the byline of A.J. Kenealy in The Illustrated American, edition of July 7, 1894.

Aye, Aye, My Lady

Yachtsmen of the old school are always conservative. Some of them are cranks. The New York Yacht Club has a few of these eccentric antiques on its muster roll, who serve as a foil to the lively and progressive members with which the organization abounds.

When Mrs. Lucy C. Carnegie, of Pittsburg[sic], Pa., ordered her new steam yacht Dungeness, she thought it would be a capital thing if she could prevail upon the New York Yacht Club to grant her permission to fly the club burgee and to use the club floats and stations. With this ended in view she opened diplomatic negotiations, and caused as much consternation among the “old barnacles” just alluded to as a hungry hawk in a chicken walk.

Mrs. Carnegie’s sponsors were Mr. Archibald Rogers and Mr. Fairman Rogers, two fo the most popular men in the domain of clubdom, and each an excellent and enthusiastic sportman. When these gentlemen proposed her for membership, the old fogies were aghast. In dark corners of the club, over strong cigars and jorums of punch, they brooded over their troubles and caucused and caballed with all the dark secrecy and tireless energy of South American conspirators plotting a revolution.

The worst of it was they were so few in number, and their cause was so patently weak and flaccid, that they reminded one of the Irishman who flocked by himself. When they sought sympathetic followers they found “offensive partisans,” all devoted to Mrs. Carnegie; and thus the conspirators were foiled and Lovely Woman won the day.

At the last general meeting of the club, held on May 17, the constitution was amended, and now any woman owning a yacht is eligible as a flag member. She may fly the club burgee, have her private signal emblazoned in the club book, enter her yacht in races, and use the club floats and stations to her heart’s content.

There is, however, one proud prerogative from which she is debarred, and that is the right of suffrage. The male owner of a 40-footer, that leaks like a sieve, can vote, but the club is not yet prepared to allow a like privilege to the possessor of a steel steam yacht, brand new, 135 feet long, and superbly appointed. But the pessimists say the entering wedge has been driven in, and they predict, with dismay, the reign of a petticoated commodore–the very thought of which dread contingency makes them feel like taking a swim in the styx.

The more gallant and go-ahead members take an opposite view and would welcome with open arms (this is, of course, figurative) as many ladies as possible into the club. The more the merrier is their jocund cry. What would the cruise of the New York Yacht Club–the great aquatic event of the year–be without the girls? Mighty dull I promise you, and as insipid as cold boiled veal without the stimulating and snappy addition of salt and red pepper.

That the club is quite eager for more ladies to join the body is significantly shown by the circumstance that it does not exact its usual pound of flesh from women yacht owners, but gallantly lets them off from paying the entrance fee and is content with the annual dues.
Mrs. Carnegie is a devoted yachtswoman. In her old steam yacht Missoe she has made many a delightful cruise, but in her new boat, Dungeness, designed by Mr. George B Mallory of this city and built at Sparrow’s Point, Md., she may venture on voyages of more ambitious endeavor and greater length. The trial trip of the Dungeness was eminently successful, and she may be expected in these waters ere long.

No money has been spared in the fitting out of this vessel, for she is owned by a lady of immense wealth, whose winter home on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia, is one of the finest in the South. Cumberland Island is a lovely place, with beautiful parks and gardens, with preserves abounding in game, and, in fact, everything that gives zest to existence.

Mrs. Carnegie is a widow in the prime of life, and the fact that she has a lovely daughter approaching a marriageable age may not be without interest to certain young bachelor yacht owners who voted for her mother’s admission to the yacht club.

That other clubs will follow the example so nobly set by the premier yachting organization of America is as certain as the rising of the sun to-morrow morning. The Seawanhaka Corinthians, although hitherto credited with dry devotion to nautical science and souls whose only solace, according to popular belief, is in logarithmic sines, tangents, and secants, surprised the yachting world by their action at their last general meeting, by electing Mrs. C.B. Thompson an honorary member for the year.

Mrs. Thompson is in her element on the sea. She prefers sailing craft to steam yachts, and can take her trick at the tiller with the best. She owns the smart little cutter Indra, and in Newport last year was often seen sailing her with her boys, and handling her capitally, too. For more extended cruising she chartered the schooner Orithyia, in which she sailed on the Sound and also enjoyed several trips off shore. Finding this vessel scarcely large enough for her, she recently purchased the fine and fast schooner OEnone from Mr. Hugh Cochraine, a member of the New York and Eastern Yacht clubs whose home is in Boston.

The OEnone is a smart racing craft designed by the late Mr. Burgess. She is by no means outclasses yet, but can show the graceful contour of her fantail stern to many of the schooners enrolled int he New York Yacht Club. I have it on excellent authority that Mrs. Thompson will be the next lady empowered to fly the burgee of the club, and that she will enter her yacht in the regatta of the club and also make a bold bid for the handsome cups presented to the yachts making the fastest passages from port to port during the August squadron cruise.

Thus the era of lady membership begins under favorable auspices. That no girl will be considered positively “swagger” unless she is also a yacht owner is not unlikely in the near future. The ambition of the American girl is boundless, and nobody doubts her daring. That a lady may yet defend the America’s cup is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility, and I hope to live to see the fun.

In England, ladies have recently been admitted as members of that august body, the Yacht Racing Association of Great Britain, before whose sceptre all the recognized clubs bow down and before whose dread tribunal delinquents are summoned and duly disciplined. English women have taken great interest in the sport for many years, but it cannot be said to have yet attained the dimensions of a fashionable ad. But the pastime is becoming more popular every day, and who knows that an international rivalry of absorbing interest may not in time be developed, and that American girls may vie with their English cousins for honors on the open sea? If they do, I know not on what side my bets would be placed.

Isn’t that a fun piece? I like how progressive the author is, though I don’t think the “old barnacles” were overthrown quite as quickly as Kenealy might have predicted from 1894.