The Ever So Scandalous Bicycle

I was looking up pictures of Waratah flowers when I came across an article about the "Waratah Rovers", an Australian bicycle club in the 1890's. I have read a little bit about how the bicycle helped change fashion for women but never really realized what a scandal these new "instruments of perversity" caused when they first arrived on the scene. Women of the Victorian era took the "maxi" dress to the extreme, covered from head to toe, they weren't supposed to look like they even had legs but were simply made to glide, in volumes of fabric and with great difficulty, from place to place. According to Australian historian Peter Cochrane, "The feminine ideal in the Victorian era was a pale, weak, dependent female, relatively immobile and most definitely in need of male guidance and control." Then along comes the bicycle. Clergymen and politicians alike called this new apparatus the work of the devil. Women on bicycles were seen as being vulgar, in a suggestive position not to mention the fact they now had easy transportation to ride around willy-nilly. By far the worst, most scandalous aspect of the bicycle was what it was doing to women's clothing. God-forbid a female ever put on pants. Some of the ladies gave into pressure and forgoing all safety measures did try to ride their bicycles side saddle but happily this never really took off. Almost solely because of the bicycle, lady's fashion would never be the same much to the chagrin of all the Victorian moralists.

Coincidentally I found this article the same night a woman was appointed to what is officially Australia's highest office: governor general, the British monarch's representative in the country. Ms Quentin Bryce, a prominent lawyer, academic, women's activist and former sex discrimination commissioner, will be the first woman to hold the position in its 107-year history. And I am willing to bet sometimes she even wears pants.