In 1897, one of Sweet’s most famous guests was Tillie, the Terrible Swede, “fastest bicyclist of her sex,” who turned heads when she gave a racing exhibition on Ionia near the Union Depot. In 1898, Sweet’s became The Pantlind, which still hosts celebrities, though few as dashing as Tillie.
—Sweet’s Hotel postcard
On a spring day in 2005, my wife, children’s book author Sue Stauffacher, leaned over the women’s room sink in Big O’s pizza café on the west side of Grand Rapids, Michigan. To her left she noticed a small, framed, sepia-toned postcard showing a squat brick building with a streetcar running along in front. At first she assumed it was just one of those generic vintage images that adorn many restaurant walls, but then she realized it was a view of what she knew as the Amway Grand Plaza, a luxury hotel that today stretches back from the Grand River along Pearl Street in downtown Grand Rapids.
Back in the 1800s, the hotel was known as Sweet’s. Sue leaned closer and read the text. Fastest bicyclist of her sex. Sue had never heard of Tillie, “the Terrible Swede,” but she liked the nickname, and she especially liked that Tillie had been a woman athlete way back in the 1890s. Sue wrote about historical figures whose stories might inspire young people. She was just then finishing a picture book about blues singer Bessie Smith and was beginning another about tennis champion Althea Gibson. Maybe there was something here. Before she left the restroom, Sue promised herself to learn more about Tillie and nineteenth-century bicycling.
Starting with simple web searches, Sue discovered that Tillie’s last name was Anderson and that she was born in Sweden in 1875. She came to America as a teenager. The website of the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame said that Tillie had been inducted in 2000 as the hall’s first nineteenth-century woman honoree. There was a tillieanderson.com, which featured some tantalizing images and passages from an article published in The Wheelmen, a magazine for old-time cycling enthusiasts. There wasn’t much else available on the web, so Sue sent three dollars for a copy of the May 2000 issue.
In the meantime, she learned what she could about nineteenth-century cycling. She discovered that the old “high-wheel” bicycles had pretty much died out by the early 1890s, replaced by the so-called safety bicycle—safer, with its chain-driven gearing, pneumatic tires, and low, comfortable mount, than the top-heavy high-wheels. With this new, more practical ride, the bicycle boom exploded across the country. Some four million cyclists—about a third of them women—hit the American road by 1895.1
The bicycle craze transformed American culture, for women in particular. There was a famous quote from Susan B. Anthony: “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”2 Suddenly women had the freedom to ride unattended away from their homes and chaperones—and meet one another in parks and on street corners. In place of hoop skirts and corsets, bicycling women took to wearing bloomers, the baggy pantaloons that became a symbol of the first wave of American feminism. Yes, Sue decided, there was definitely something here.
Soon the Wheelmen article arrived. Written by Heather Drieth, “Tillie Anderson, the Terrible Swede: America’s Women’s Champion” told the basic story of Tillie’s career—how she’d worked as a seamstress in Chicago before saving enough money for her first bike, how she set the Elgin-Aurora “century” road record in 1895, and how she made her professional racing debut on an indoor track in Chicago in January 1896. Tillie won that first contest and went on to dominate the women’s national circuit through 1902, “the last year of women’s bicycle racing in America.”3
Sue learned that women’s racing had ridden an immense wave of popularity from 1895 to 1902. An organized circuit of riders had zigzagged across the country and staged hundreds of races on small slapdash tracks built inside baseball parks and on county fairgrounds or squeezed into roller rinks, armories, and auditoriums. With five or six women spinning in tight bunches around those tiny tracks, it was like roller derby on bikes, and reporters in city after city described the races as the most thrilling athletic events they’d ever witnessed. The women’s races were as popular as the men’s, maybe even more so, drawing five or even ten thousand men, women, and children, who stomped and shouted over the pounding beat of local orchestras playing from the grandstand.
Not everyone loved them, however. Tillie Anderson and the other top racers came to embody the New Woman—physical and independent, eager to enter the male-dominated public sphere—and as such they threatened Victorian notions of strength, beauty, and womanhood. Women’s racing was derided by sportsmen who believed against all evidence that the races simply had to be fixed—that women were incapable of true athletic competition. It was thought by some to cause infertility and disfigurement, and it was denounced by medical groups, religious groups, and women’s groups. Most significantly, women’s racing was actively suppressed by cycling’s leading national organization, the League of American Wheelmen, or LAW, which refused to sanction women’s races and punished men who promoted or officiated them.
Sue put together a picture-book proposal for her publisher, Random House Children’s Books. Actually it was a scrapbook, with images of fashionable ladies’ fancy cycling costumes and excerpts from newspaper and magazine articles exhorting women to stay feminine and ladylike at all times. “Into these turbulent times,” Sue handwrote across one page, “strode shopkeeper by day Tillie Anderson.” Tillie, with her experience as a seamstress, led the charge by women racers to abandon the flouncy costumes they’d inherited from the high-wheel days and adopt more aerodynamic, form-fitting outfits. Tillie was not only the champion racer of the circuit but also a leading force for cultural change. By the time Sue sent the scrapbook to her editor, she had a pretty good idea for the title of the proposed picture book: Tillie the Terrible Swede: How One Woman, a Sewing Needle, and a Bicycle Changed History.
There was only one problem: no one at Random House had ever heard of Tillie Anderson. Most picture-book biographies focused on well-known current and historical figures—Abraham Lincoln, Jane Goodall, Satchel Paige. Luckily for Sue, her editor, Nancy Hinkel, was also the publishing director for the Knopf and Crown imprints for young readers, and after lengthy discussion with the editorial and marketing teams, Nancy accepted Sue’s somewhat unorthodox proposal and sent her a contract. Nancy and Sue had already worked together on two successful middle-grade novels, and given Sue’s track record, Random House was willing to take a chance on a book about Tillie Anderson and women’s racing.
Months later, Sue received an email from a woman in Kansas:
Hi, Sue,
My name is Alice Roepke. I recently learned you have authored a children’s book about Tillie Anderson, the world champion ladies bicycle racer at the turn of the last century. Is that correct? I would be very interested in learning more about it as I am Tillie’s great niece and have been promoting her career over the past ten years in various ways.
Kindest regards,
Alice
A friend of Alice’s had heard about plans for Sue’s book, and Alice had found some of Random House’s prepublicity for it. Alice’s mother, Evelyn Olson, had been the daughter of Tillie’s younger sister Emma. In fact, Alice had, as a baby, been held in her great-aunt Tillie’s arms. As Alice suggested in her email, for the past decade she’d been working tirelessly as Tillie’s only living advocate. It was she who had created and maintained the Tillie Anderson website and who had single-handedly campaigned to get Tillie belatedly inducted into the Bicycling Hall of Fame. Alice and her husband, Terry, had hired an independent filmmaker to make a documentary about Tillie and nineteenth-century women’s racing. A rough cut of the film had been completed, but the project had stalled. Finally, Sue discovered that it was Alice and Terry who had enlisted Heather Drieth, a journalist for the local Waterville Telegraph, to write that Wheelmen article. Indeed, all of the information for that article had come from a single remarkable source, a treasure trove that Alice kept locked away in a lakeside cabin—Tillie’s cabin, built in the 1920s—in northern Minnesota: Tillie’s four scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, handwritten notes, letters, telegrams, official race documents, and dozens of photographs and images—including the Sweet’s postcard from Grand Rapids.
Suddenly, Sue had access to way too much material for a picture book, and in any case it was too late for inclusion in the main narrative of the completed manuscript. Alice did make a significant contribution to the book, however. Nancy Hinkel had lined up the British artist Sarah McMenemy to provide the book’s illustrations, and Sarah integrated several of Alice’s generously shared images into her artwork, helping to make the final published volume both historically accurate and visually animated. In the end, nearly six years after that sepia-toned postcard had caught Sue’s eye in the restroom of Big O’s pizza café, Tillie the Terrible Swede was published in the spring of 2011.
*
Sue and I finally met Alice and Terry that May. Sue wanted to do something special to mark her book’s publication, and she got the idea for the two of us to ride from our home in Grand Rapids to Tillie’s adopted hometown of Chicago—some 260 miles away. We were not avid cyclists, so this was no light undertaking. Fortunately, several friends joined us, including one who knew how to repair a flat tire. We left on a Monday morning, and each day we rode about fifty miles, stopping along the way to visit underfunded elementary or middle schools that normally couldn’t afford author visits. Sue, dressed in a woolen outfit similar to those Tillie wore for racing, would lead our pack into the school playground or parking lot and make a presentation in the auditorium or cafeteria. By Friday we had made it to a school on Chicago’s South Side and then pushed our way up along Lakeshore Drive, finishing the week with events at the Sulzer Regional Library near Lincoln Square and the Swedish American Museum up in Andersonville. That’s where Alice and Terry joined our crew, celebrating that night with a Swedish meal at Tre Kronor restaurant in Albany Park.
The next day the four of us got a chance to know each other as we walked the streets of Evanston in search of two of Tillie’s former addresses. As thrilled as Alice was about the publication of Sue’s book, she told us that she still hoped to see a full biography written. There was so much more to Tillie’s story, and so little was known about her and her fellow racers from that era. Of course we all agreed. Then, without thinking much about it, I heard myself volunteering for the project. “All I know about Tillie is what’s in Sue’s book,” I said, “and I know even less about nineteenth-century cycling. But I’m willing to learn.”
So learn I did. Over the next two years, I set about educating myself, retracing what Sue had discovered and consulting all the books, academic articles, and magazine articles I could find that discussed the bicycle boom and women’s racing. What I learned surprised me. There had been both men’s and women’s racing in the old high-wheel days of the 1870s and 1880s, but the unwieldy machines were more a novelty than anything else, and the trudging, round-the-clock six-day races (ending on Saturday night to avoid the Sabbath) were primarily tests of endurance rather than speed. Women’s high-wheel racing all but died in the early 1890s. Then everything changed when the diamond-frame safety bicycle hit the scene, and the bicycle boom exploded. One historian likened the shift from the high-wheel to the safety to the one that occurred nearly a hundred years later when bulky mainframe computers were overtaken by PCs.4 It was a revolution, and cycling in general and bicycle racing in particular became major cultural forces in the middle and late 1890s.
The craze faded as quickly as it had arrived, however, with the rise of the automobile and other spectator sports. Men’s bicycle racing limped along in the early years of the twentieth century before enjoying a renaissance in the twenties and thirties. But women’s racing was another matter. The Amateur Bicycle League held a “girls’ championship” in 1937, but the first official women’s championship would not be held until 1958, when Tillie Anderson was eighty-three years old. In Europe, the Tour de France for men started in 1903, but the first women’s version wasn’t held until 1984, the same year that women’s road racing debuted in the Olympics. Women’s track racing debuted in 1988—ninety-two years after the first men’s event.5 By that time, the records of women racers from the 1890s—never officially published in the first place because of the LAW’s refusal to recognize them—had long been forgotten.
Men’s cycling records, I found, were faithfully kept and chronicled by such publications as Cycling Gazette, Outing magazine, Sporting Life, the Scrapbook on Bicycle Racing, and the L.A.W. Bulletin. But over time, women’s records effectively disappeared. Today, even brief references to 1890s women’s bicycle racing are rare. A 1988 book subtitled The History of American Bicycle Racing makes no mention at all of nineteenth-century women racers, saying only that “social pressures and lack of opportunity kept women from making an impression on the sport.”6 Histories on women athletes of the nineteenth century and their influence on American sports feature tennis, golf, archery, baseball, and adventuring but mention bicycling only in passing as a club sport. When they occur at all, descriptions of 1890s women’s racing are typically limited only to an enticing sentence or two, as, for example, in the Encyclopedia of Women and Sport in America: “In the late 1890s, generally considered to be the golden age of cycling, women’s cycling competitions in the United States consisted of grueling six-day races emphasizing endurance and determination. As the bike was displaced by automobiles, these cycling competitions for women faded.”7 As I would soon learn, this golden age comprised seven years and several hundred wildly popular races held in cities all across the country, yet here it is summarized in fewer than fifty words. It’s easy to imagine Alice Roepke’s frustration.
As I read Tillie’s scrapbooks, I discovered what Alice already knew: precious few of the era’s prominent racers are mentioned in published sources available today. And when they are, the information about them is often incorrect. For example, the notorious Lisette, a French import, is listed in one comprehensive history of cycling as the European champion of 1896, which is true enough, but that same source says that Lisette retired in 1898—the very year she began a celebrated three-year rivalry with Tillie, crisscrossing the United States in one showdown after another.8 Another European, the Belgian Hélène Dutrieu, is remembered as having won unofficial world track titles in 1897 and 1898 and is credited with going faster on a bicycle in one hour than any other woman in the 1890s.9 That honor, I now know, belongs to Tillie Anderson.
According to the 2011 edition of the Historical Dictionary of Cycling, “the first well-known female competitive cyclist was Alfonsina Strada,” an Italian who competed in both the Giro di Lombardia and the Giro d’Italia in the early 1920s.10 Pioneering though she may have been, Strada was certainly not the first well-known female competitive cyclist. There were at least five of them in the 1890s: Tillie Anderson, Lizzie Glaw, Dottie Farnsworth, Helen Baldwin, and May Allen, known collectively across America as the Big Five.
I also discovered that, with the notable exception of Alice Roepke, not even the descendants of the famous “female flyers” of the 1890s knew about the sport or their ancestors’ participation in it. Hoping to collect anecdotes and documents from relatives of women racers of the era, I joined a genealogy service and wrote to as many people as I could. Time after time, instead of collecting information, I found myself sharing it, being the first to tell my contacts that their great-grandmother or great-aunt had raced bicycles in tight woolen outfits in front of thousands of people across America in the late 1890s.
It’s hard to blame anybody for not knowing about this forgotten golden age. The historical record simply isn’t there. In 1998 New Zealand scholar Clare Simpson wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on women and cycling in the late nineteenth century and later contributed a chapter on the subject to a 2007 collection called Cycling and Society. “The paucity of primary and secondary sources for women’s racing,” she wrote, “as well as its uneven representation in those sources, points to an over-reliance on one or two sources at this stage of the research.”11 Interestingly, one of Simpson’s main sources of information about women’s racing in America was Heather Drieth’s Wheelmen article—which of course had come directly from Alice Roepke’s Minnesota treasure trove.
The fact is, the many achievements of these women racers have simply never been adequately or accurately compiled. The LAW didn’t do it, and neither did the sports publications of the day. If records were kept at all, they were kept by the racers themselves. Like many sports figures of the time, Tillie Anderson—along with her husband, Phil—kept scrapbooks throughout her racing career. They subscribed to a clipping service, and when each new batch of articles arrived at their house or hotel room, Phil would carefully arrange the articles in order and glue them into place. By the end of her career, Tillie had four full scrapbooks, over four hundred pages overall, with thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, each recalling the sights and sounds of those great races.
Tillie’s scrapbooks understandably focus on her and her races. But in paper and digital archives around the country, I found hundreds of articles about other racers and other races. As I spent much of 2012 and 2013 reliving those races, I found my book project expanding beyond the story of Tillie Anderson. The entire forgotten era of women’s racing needed to be revived.
Thanks to the enthusiastic and at times effusive journalism of the time, it’s possible still to imagine what it must have been like for the men, women, and children of those last few years of the nineteenth century to mount the rickety wooden grandstands and look down on the tiny oval track to see the women enter the arena in their shockingly modern athletic attire and spin around the saucer at speeds scarcely imaginable in that age of horse carriages and streetcars. The way the women leaned into the turns seemed to defy the laws of physics, and the way they jumped up from the inevitable spills, often bruised and bloody, and pedaled back to top speed in seconds seemed to defy the laws of nature.
They were America’s first great women athletes, and they deserve more than a postcard to commemorate their achievements. They deserve their place in history.