Where the Women on Wheels Really Are
I was fascinated, and a little bewildered, by a post at Velojoy yesterday. Susi writes: “It was refreshing to discover in the League’s most recent Bicycle Friendly America Guide a list of 10 communities where female commuters outnumber their male counterparts.” Then the post gives a list of of the 10 cities with a higher percentage of females riding, including places such as Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Vancouver, Washington. It’s a little hard to trust... Read More
The Two Most Important Words in Biking Today
I don’t hate cars. I don’t hate the heavy old Volvo that drove me to the hospital to deliver my first son, the oversized SUV that took me to birth my second son, or the big new SUV that helped rush him and me to the emergency room two years later when he cut the top off his finger. I don’t hate the cars that have delivered me safely to happy events, helped me move, taken me to far-flung weekends of skiing, and hiking, and even antiquing cross country. I don’t... Read More
Are Women Really Afraid to Bike?
Pitting the Pinterest photographic evidence (pretty girls on bikes floating through the world’s major cities) with the actually statistics (3 men cycling to every one woman) is depressing. I’ve been thinking about it for two years, as I wrote the book, and blog posts, and articles. Why don’t more women ride? It started to seem that a low-level persistent fear of riding in traffic was paralyzing people, especially women, who want to bike. In organizing the recent... Read More
Women on Wheels Has Arrived!
Girls on bikes needs to grow up – and here’s the book to help it do so. Women on Wheels: A Handbook and How-To for City Cyclists, is the result of my musings on the question: “Why do men outnumber women in the bike lanes by an average of 3 to 1?” and of course, “Why don’t more women ride?” It takes me 200 pages to try to dispel some of the myths and answer the questions. Order one now. Autographed by the author…i.e. me! Read More
Why We Ride
When you meet 100 or more people at a trade show – in this case the New Amsterdam Bike Show, you may think you start to see a pattern in who stops by your booth to chat, or just look, or take your book in hand and buy it. But then someone walks up and changes your mind. Today my someone was Justine. Justine sidled up sideways, dress in an oversized coat, black ballet flats and a sashed blouse. Her blond hair was freshly washed and neatly combed, though not exactly ‘coiffed’.... Read More
If You Give a Girl a Bicycle…
She’ll ride it. Which is what I have been doing, every chance I get. And, there’s no better birthday present. So, I give you the official Girlsonbikes bicycle, a beautiful Fuji touring bike powdercoated in GOB green/blue. Getting a present of this magnitude and loveliness makes me think of all the women everywhere who either don’t bike, can’t bike, or haven’t got a bike. With the total gratitude I have for all the luck I’ve had in my life,... Read More
Are City Cyclists’ Vulvas in Danger?
Mimosa Pale’s vulva on a bike, which she calls the ‘Mobile Female Monument’. Here’s the post I did at TreeHugger today. They stripped it of the vulva picture, but you can see it here! A recent Yale study written about in Monday’s New York Times studied 48 “consistent” women cycllists who cycled at least 10 miles each week. They concluded that handlebar positioning can be a big determinant in whether women cyclists experience numbing... Read More
Dorothy, Soldier-Cyclist
There must be something socially a little dangerous about a women on a bicycle. Why else would repressive Islamic regimes forbid women from riding? Why would North Korea make it an offense for women to ride in pants? One forgotten WWI cyclist, Dorothy Lawrence, rode her bike to the front lines, masqueraded as a man, helped plant trench mines, gave herself up and was arrested, was pressed to not sell her sensational story to the news, wrote a book, got censored, got raped (according... Read More
Girls on Bikes – in 1869
From J.T. Goddard's The Velocipede Perhaps I should get over my astonishment that women started riding bikes a LOT earlier than male-written history generally attests. We’ve been living in a man’s world for a mighty long time. Even ladies, as they were generally referred to in 19th century news, had a thirst for personal mobility. The draisine was nearly impossible to manuever in skirts, and yet at least one dandyzette must have inspired Cruikshank to draw his... Read More
Girls On Bikes – Bertha and the Billion Bike Rides
In my quest to find the “first female cyclist” I initially spent time researching the development of the safety bicycle, convinced that a female relative of one of the many involved in its “invention” would have egged on her spouse/brother/cousin to make a bike SHE could ride. I quickly realized that women rode bikes – velocipedes and even the ladies’ draisine – long before bicycles per se entered the scene. That led me to Carrie... Read More
