The Moral Threat of Bicycles in the 1890s

The bicycle craze of the 19th century, in which both men and women participated, was seen
as a moral affront by church leaders.

Livia Gershon
February 22, 2016
2 minutes
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If you’re an American adult who regularly rides a bicycle, you might feel a tiny sense of
moral superiority about getting exercise and reducing your carbon footprint. But in the
1890s, the moral discourse around bike riding was very different, and much more fraught.
As Michael Taylor explained in a 2010 paper, Protestant authorities saw cycling as a
significant threat to morality, and tried to mold the sport into a Christian activity.

Cycling women often wore bloomers that were much like men’s pants and were widely
seen as indecent.

Up until the invention of the modern “safety” bicycle in 1887, few women rode the high
wheel bicycles of the previous generation. But in the 1890s, a “cycling craze” offered
a new kind of mobility to many young women.

Bikes facilitated unchaperoned dates—even elopements. Just as troubling to some moralists

of the day, cycling women often wore bloomers, widely seen as indecent, that were much
like men’s pants. The Women’s Rescue League of Boston even claimed that, following the
closing of brothels, prostitutes were riding bikes to reach their clients.

Another charge against the cycling craze was that people were spending their Sundays—
often the only work-free day of the week—on bike rides rather than at church. Already,
male church attendance had been on the decline. As a sport open to both women and men,
cycling threatened to leave preachers with congregations made up of only the sick and the
elderly.

One Indianapolis minister started a riding group with young members of the church, only to
be censured by older congregants for his “frivolous bicycle ways.”

At the same time, men’s cycling raised moral questions that were common to sports in
general. Religious leaders worried about unhealthy, vicious competition. Taylor quotes a
Presbyterian newspaper reporting on a race in 1897 in which one racer was “kept constantly
loaded with cocaine.” Another pushed himself so hard that he nearly lost consciousness.

Yet, for the “muscular Christian” movement that started late in the nineteenth century,
bicycles were also a useful technology. Like other sports, cycling was a way to build
courage, determination, and strength. As one minister told his congregants, cycling could
help them achieve “the very highest, fullest and completest physical, mental and spiritual
culture.” Cycling advocates also celebrated the sport as an alternative to saloons, gaming
houses, and other morally objectionable forms of recreation.

Cycling opened rifts between and within churches. One Indianapolis minister started a
riding group with young members of the church, only to be censured by older congregants
for his “frivolous bicycle ways.”

Taylor writes that the moral controversy over bicycles ended as quickly as it began. By the
early 1900s, the cycling craze wound down. The price of bicycles fell, transforming their
image into a working-class mode of transportation rather than an accessory for leisure.
Meanwhile, the automobile replaced the bicycle as a subject of religious concern. And
within a few decades, Taylor writes, “it was hard to imagine a more inoffensive means of
transportation and entertainment.”
How World War I Put Boys on Bikes
The first modern bicycles were for adults. Ads for boys’ bikes drew from, and fed into, a
changing vision of boyhood during World War I.

iStock

Livia Gershon

August 16, 2017

2 minutes

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It would be hard to find a find a product and a demographic more tightly tied together in
our cultural imagination than boys and bikes. Robert J. Turpin writes that that association
was born a century ago, when manufacturers’ need for customers lined up with changing
ideas about youth and masculinity during World War I.

In the 1890s, soon after the first modern bicycles made it easy for anyone to ride, bicycling
emerged as a means of transportation and recreation—for adults. In those years, Turpin
writes, manufacturers did build kids’ bikes, but they weren’t a big marketing focus. The
only ads for them were in catalogs.

But, as the adult “bicycle craze” faded, manufacturers turned to kids—boys in particular—
as a new customer base. The idea of children as targets for advertising emerged in the years
just before World War I. Magazines like American Boy began selling themselves to
advertisers as a way to reach the child consumer they saw emerging.
 Two WWI-era bicycle
advertisements (via Women’s Studies Quarterly)

Some ads promoted bicycles to both boys and girls as an avenue for exercise and good
health. But many presented them as a specifically male childhood necessity.

Turpin writes that ads for boys’ bikes drew from, and fed into, a changing vision of
boyhood and American nationalism. Like the Boy Scouts, the bicycle presented a way for
boys to appreciate the beauty of the country, develop a sense of independence, and
physically prepare for military service. In ads, boys roamed the countryside, catching frogs
or fishing in ponds.

Some ads during World War I literally linked bicycles to national service. In one from the
New Departure Coaster Brake Company, a Boy Scout on a bike sold Liberty Bonds in front
of copy boasting about the Scouts’ use of bikes to support patriotic programs. An ad for the
tire-maker U.S. Rubber Company proclaimed that the boy of 1918 “helps take the place of
older chaps who have gone to war.”

Even after the war ended, bike ads remained focused on the transformation of boys into
strong young men. On 1921 ad asked “does your boy… have the glorious chance to
develop himself physically and mentally in the happy way a bicycle brings?”

Through the interwar years and beyond, the notion that boys must develop into strong,
capable men, with increasing independence and mobility, remained connected with the
bicycle.