Flâneurie on bicycles: acquiescence to women in public in the 1890s

Abstract

Although scholars have established the publicity of all types of nineteenth‐century women, their public actions are still regarded as morally constrained. We offer one group of public women, bourgeois cyclists, who after encountering public skepticism only briefly were given free rein of the streets and country roads. This propensity of women and men to ride the thoroughfares ‘a‐wheel’ we refer to as flâneurie on bicycles, a technology‐mediated form of the pedestrian variety. Similarities and differences necessarily abound because of the requirements of safe cycling and the long‐distance rambling capacity of cyclists. We argue, however, that flâneurie of the bicycle kind is largely faithful to the original in that cycling promoted peripatetic individualism, for female as well as male riders.

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