Respectable Identities: New Zealand Nineteenth-Century 'New Women' - on Bicycles!

Abstract

For nineteenth-century New Zealand middle-class women, cycling elicited significant anxieties about femininity. Critics ultimately feared that women would become masculine in both their appearance and their conduct. The masculinization of women was neatly embodied in the 'New Woman' who, in contrast to the conventional image of women, heralded a new feminine identity: physically and politically active, and prominent in public. The ideology of the New Woman arose in the context of widespread social change for Western women throughout the nineteenth century, after decades of agitation for improved access to education, employment, political representation, and equal legal rights with men. In this article, it is argued that middle-class female cyclists tried to reconcile the ideology of the New Woman with conventional beliefs about femininity to create an alternative, yet still respectable, identity in order to convince their critics that despite riding the bicycle, they were still feminine.

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