The Pedagogy of the Bicycle: Frances E. Willard Teaching Dissent, Celebrating Conquest

• In Event: Beyond Childhood: Teaching with Bikes, Bubblegum Cards, and Toys

Abstract

Frances E. Willard, with her “Do Everything” slogan, is one of Chicago’s most celebrated Progressive-Era reformers. Her role as women’s suffragist, Dean of the Women’s College at Northwestern University, and president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1879 - 1898 is well documented. However, my paper focuses on Willard’s lesser-known passion for the bicycle as a vehicle of social reform in her crusade for sobriety. For Willard, and many reform-minded “new women,” the essential mobility of the bicycle resulting in women’s movement through public space posed an unavoidable and direct challenge to established thinking about women’s political agency. But, this history elides the ways in which these largely white “new women” participated in hegemonic and imperial forms of world-ordering. Thus, my paper examines the relationship between Willard’s call for social and political reform, and an imperialist call for mastery and conquest of the self and the world.

I locate Willard’s rhetoric of conquest in her 1895 instructional guide, A Wheel Within A Wheel: How I Learned To Ride the Bicycle. While the pedagogical function of this text is to teach women how to cycle, Willard’s lessons additionally preach that conquest of the self, the bicycle, and the world is a sign of one’s moral fortitude and is essential in the fight for sobriety, and for women’s rights. Her cycling guide, within the historical context of women’s suffrage, is a pedagogical tool for women’s opposition to the existing social order; and yet, my analysis highlights the problematic ways in which her rhetoric of dissent additionally depended upon imperial logics of domination.

Building upon the example of Willard’s rhetoric of reform and/as conquest, I aim to complicate the liberatory history of the “new woman” and her bicycle, and resist the progress narrative of the traditional feminist subject, what Amy L. Brandzel calls the “whitenormative citizen-woman,” to allow for a more complex feminist reading. In looking at early white “new women” cyclists’ efforts to protest and to conquer, I highlight the legacy of imperialism and white supremacy inherited—and often unrecognized—by present-day mainstream feminist theory and praxis.

Author

• Christine Bachman-Sanders, University of Minnesota Twin Cities