What effect has bicycle riding on the contour of a woman’s nether limbs? It has been said persistently by opponents of the wheel for the gentle sex, as well as by women who have tried the sport and given it up, that the exertion of pedaling tends to mar the natural grace and symmetry of the leg and develop it into a mass of bone and muscle, not only unshapely and unsightly, but in a manner calculated to injure the other portions of the body and undermine the general constitution.
—“Feminine Limbs Lose Beauty of Outline When the Bicycle Is Ridden,” St. Louis Republic, December 12, 1897
The “nether limbs” in this case belonged to twenty-two-year-old Tillie Anderson, fresh off a six-day bicycle race at the Coliseum, welcoming a doctor, nurse, and reporter into her room at the Belvidere Hotel in downtown St. Louis for a physical and aesthetic evaluation of her thighs, knees, calves, and ankles. At stake, at least according to the reporter, was perhaps the final verdict on the bicycle boom of the mid-1890s.
Readers knew that the boom had already transformed the American concept of leisure time, especially weekends, and prompted a nationwide push for better roads. The boom made cyclists of millions of American women. It was their active participation in the craze that had given rise to a new unity that helped to advance the first wave of feminist reform, which included the rational dress movement and increased interest in women’s health.
The feminist push spurred by the boom triggered a vigorous national debate over the potential dangers to the “weaker sex” of recreational cycling. By 1897, however, most observers acknowledged that the bike-riding “bloomer girls” had emerged from several years of weekend jaunts and workday commutes relatively unscathed—indeed, healthier and happier than ever.1
But surely women’s bicycle racing was another matter. Surely, as the Stillwater Messenger had put it, it was possible to endorse recreational cycling but still “protest against young women posing as race horses for purses in the public arena.”2 Casual weekend riding was one thing, but year-round professional racing was quite another. Many still agreed with what Bicycle News had rather plaintively observed back in 1896: “It is not considered strictly ‘nice’ for women to ride in races.”3
There was no doubt about the sport’s popularity. The women’s racing circuit had by December 1897 drawn tens of thousands of eagerly paying customers across the Midwest, including St. Louis. The question for the moment was whether such intense exertion and obvious bodily harm would eventually lead to women’s physical ruin. The answer, apparently, stood in this second-floor doorway of the Belvidere Hotel, wearing nothing but slippers, underwear, and a long flannel bathrobe. After responding to several questions about her personal background and racing record, Tillie reclined on the sofa and, under the watchful eyes of her visitors, lifted her robe, uncovering her naked right leg.
It could have been the only adult female leg the reporter had ever really examined. As Tillie’s niece had suggested, fashionable Victorian women appeared in full dress as essentially legless. Even at the circus or beach, where the outlines of women’s legs were sometimes visible, they were always covered by tights or hose. This leg was completely exposed.
At the reporter’s request, the doctor—Dr. John Dean, senior assistant at City Hospital—measured the various parts of the leg and described its overall condition. The thigh and calf measurements weren’t terribly unusual, and indeed Tillie claimed that the actual size of her leg had not changed much at all since she’d started cycling three years earlier. Like the rest of her body, the leg had simply become stronger and firmer.
Dr. Dean identified and described the leg in scientific terms, beginning with the “biceps” muscle at the back of the thigh. There was the propliteus muscle, the hamstring, and the popliteal space. Below the knee there was the gastrocnemius muscle, the soleus, the extensor proprius hallucis, the tibialis anticus, the extensor longus digitorum, the annular ligament, and the tendo achillis.
The reporter added subjective assessments to the doctor’s technical descriptions, often verging on fetishistic detail. Above the knee, Tillie’s leg was “well-nigh perfect,” he wrote. “The thigh is beautifully shaped, the flesh and muscles are soft, [and] there is an absence of superfluous fat.” Its muscles were “decidedly pronounced to the touch, though not at all hard, as one would expect to find. . . . When at rest there is enough flesh on this part of the limb to be taken and kneaded like dough. The skin is pure white, soft and smooth, without the sign of hairy growth.”
“Generally speaking, Miss Anderson’s limb, from the thigh to the knee joint is artistically and anatomically well proportioned, possessing the grace and desirable curvature of the popular soubrette and the muscular development of a woman accustomed to hard, healthy, rejuvenating exercises. The fact that its regular outlines have not been materially changed since she has been racing would seem to show that exercise, though sometimes indulged in to excess, produced excellent results in hastening the growth of the sinews and at the same time preserving natural shapeliness.”
The lower leg was equally impressive, beginning with the calf. “In this particular portion of her anatomy,” wrote the reporter, “Miss Anderson is a wonder.” In an average woman, the calf is “well covered by layers of fat, is soft and marked only to a strong touch.” But Tillie’s upper calf, “arising by two heads,” was “regular in form and even graceful” and remarkably hard to the touch. Tillie’s lower calf was “firm and vigorous,” and around the front the muscle over the shin was “beautifully developed, soft and regular in shape.” The ankle tendons were “strongly marked and regular in outline.”
“From an anatomical standpoint,” the reporter said, “Miss Anderson has a beautiful leg. . . . Every bone and muscle and tendon is wonderfully developed and distinctly marked.” On the other hand, “the veins . . . are tortuous and unduly swollen.” Taken altogether, he concluded, the leg “resembles a man’s more than a woman’s.”
“I was very weak when I began,” Tillie explained, “but now I never suffer from pains and aches, as most women do.” She said that as a professional racer she generally trained about thirty minutes a day on her bicycle to keep in shape. In addition, she said, “I regularly practice club-swinging, dumb-bell lifting, a little boxing, take lots of outdoor exercise and look after my health as best I can.”
She then described the changes she herself had observed in her body since she began serious cycling—poking some fun along the way at Ida Peterson. “Three years ago I was very fat in the legs,” she said, “almost as much so as Miss Peterson, one of my competitors in the St. Louis race, is today.” Tillie had been thin as a teenager but grew to nearly 150 pounds by 1895, the year she turned twenty, and couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without resting. “My muscles were not at all developed, though it was but a short time when the fat began to peel off and give way to sinewy strength. My abdominal and arm muscles also developed rapidly, and I have a particularly prominent one in the back, due I think, to bending over the wheel.” Now, she said, she carried a solid 138 pounds on her five-foot-six frame.
The unambiguous title of the Republic’s feature—“Feminine Limbs Lose Beauty of Outline When the Bicycle Is Ridden”—made abundantly clear the editorial stance, but the article itself concluded with a fairly evenhanded assessment: “The measurements from the knee to the ankle answer artistic requirements, though the outlines are not up to the painter’s ideal. The average theater-goer would not fancy Miss Anderson’s lower limb curves, nor would she be able to get an engagement on their recommendation. But to a person who appreciates the beauties of an anatomically perfect woman, her remarkable muscular development possesses many charms.”
In addition to the written account, a rather subjective visual case was made with contrasting sketches—first a minimalist single-line drawing “of an approximately perfect limb” seen from the side, with no depth or contour at all; and then front and side views of Tillie’s right leg, intricately detailed with shading and cross-hatching. The “artistic” version looked like a cartoon, while Tillie’s “anatomical” versions looked like something out of Gray’s Anatomy.4
The article was reprinted a week later, slightly abridged, in the New York Journal, and it likely appeared elsewhere as well. The detailed drawings and accompanying descriptions must have been startling, even scandalous, to the average Victorian. Tillie’s leg became the talk of the town in New York and St. Louis and around the country. Women’s racing was already popular—every bit as popular as the men’s marathon events or any other major sport of the time, including boxing, baseball, and football—but the leg article helped to push it even further into the mainstream of American sports culture.
On race days the women got plenty of attention not only for their racing ability but also for their looks and bodies. Like actors on the stage, they showed to greatest advantage on the track, with skintight outfits and, as the few existing photographs reveal, heavy eye makeup and carefully coiffed hair. The regular sports writers could be blunt about some of the women’s physical shortcomings, but in general the men seemed pleased to focus on those they considered attractive and athletic. In the wider culture, however, considerable uneasiness remained about the overall propriety of women’s athletics, and on a couple of occasions commentators from beyond the sports pages pinned the racers under the glaring light of traditional social values and found them wanting. One such instance occurred before the start of that December 1897 race in St. Louis when a two-page spread was published that clearly aimed to discredit the sport and portray the women not as models of healthful vigor and beauty but as cautionary specimens who showed just how hardened and masculine women could become if they embraced the extremes of professional sports.
Fanny Darling was one of the few reporters during this era who ventured behind the scenes for a more intimate look at the women and their lives, but she obviously carried the gender-based preconceptions of Victorian society. She spoke with six racers and came away nothing short of disgusted; up close and “at home” in their hotel rooms, the women looked to Darling like men dressed up in women’s robes, skirts, and Empire dresses. Physically “tanned and hardened” from years of outdoor racing, the women were, to Darling’s mind, coarse in manner as well—even repulsive. All six radiated an “independent air” that Darling clearly found contrary to her notion of proper womanhood.
The racers spoke openly about their backgrounds, their earnings, and how their families felt about their careers and skimpy racing outfits. Before she began competing, Lillie Williams said she’d been a compositor for the Omaha Bee, and when she traveled with Tom Eck to England in the late 1880s she’d served as its London correspondent. But she made only $20 a week back then, and now she made between $3,000 and $4,000 a year. “Quite a difference, you see,” she bragged. Yes, she acknowledged, her mother was “shocked” by her occupation—and the rest of her family too—but she didn’t care. “How else can one ride?” she asked matter-of-factly. “Not in skirts and bloomers, as they would hinder our movements.”
The families of Ida Peterson and Clara Drehmel were also shocked, “nearly to death,” by the women’s choice of careers. But the two friends from Minneapolis didn’t worry about it either. They were simply “on the road to make money,” they explained. “And because we like it.”
Both Lillie and Ida acknowledged that it was a hard life, being on the road and riding races week after week. “I think it will eventually break us down and make us old before our time,” said Lillie, who’d run her first professional race nearly ten years earlier. Ida agreed: “[It] will tell on a girl if she keeps it up long enough.” She didn’t say it outright, but Fanny Darling clearly thought the sport had already “told” plenty on both women. To her, they were almost monstrously manly. She called Lillie’s hair “short and black,” her features “strong and masculine,” and her skin “tanned to a dark brown, and roughened by the wind.” Lillie in fact even likened herself to a man. “I train just like a man preparing for a prize-fight,” she said. “I get up in the morning, punch the bag for ten minutes and then box for another ten minutes. Sometimes I wrestle and jump rope till I get up a profuse perspiration, then my maid rubs me down.”
Ida, the largest of the women at five feet, six inches and 165 pounds, said she jumped rope and trained on her bike between races. Darling clearly struggled to describe the effect of seeing Ida up close and in person, away from the track. What came out was polite understatement bordering on irony. “She shows off to much better advantage in her cycling costume,” she wrote, “than in feminine wearing apparel.” The trainers and other racers, Darling noted, called Ida “Pete.”
Both Clara Drehmel and Dottie Farnsworth were nursing injuries. Clara had a black eye from a recent fall, but she shrugged it off. “I don’t think this exercise is injurious to a girl,” she said, countering Lillie and Ida, “if they are well taken care of when it’s over.”
“I have a fractured knee cap as a souvenir of my Kansas City race,” offered Dottie. “Why do I ride with such a knee? Because this is like the stage. You are booked and you can’t stay out if you once start in the business.”
Darling allowed that Dottie had “well-shaped features,” and at five feet, five inches and 114 pounds, she was closer to the feminine ideal than the others. “I do not train at all,” Dottie admitted. “I’m forced to save all of my strength for the races.” Clara Drehmel, too, had “regular” features and was the shortest of the six racers at five feet, four inches and 120 pounds. “She is also the prettiest,” Darling added.
In contrast to Dottie and Clara, Lizzie Glaw had “irregular features,” according to Darling. She was also the most direct of the bunch. “I like this business because I make money,” she declared brusquely, “and money buys comforts.” She said she trained by boxing some and jumping rope, although she admitted that lately the comforts had gotten the best of her and she hadn’t been training much. “I’m going to begin by doing it more regularly,” she vowed. When asked about the outfit she wore, Lizzie just shrugged her shoulders. “My costume isn’t very big,” she said. “I could get it in a cheese box, but you see they all wear ’em.”
Tillie was described as five feet, six inches and 140 pounds, with light yellow hair and blue eyes. She was awarded with “clear cut, regular features” and commended for having been a dressmaker prior to starting her life in racing. When Darling knocked on the hotel room door, she was pleased to find Tillie “engaged in the feminine occupation of embroidering.” She was quickly disappointed, however, when she saw that Tillie wore “a slipshoddy pair of old shoes on her feet.”
Of the six women, Tillie seemed most enthusiastic about her life on the track. She started by proudly reviewing her résumé. “I’ve been in eighty-four races,” she said, “and won eighty-two of them.” She said she rarely engaged in the backbiting and hair pulling associated with women’s racing. She didn’t need to. “I’ve won so much that I haven’t been jealous,” she explained, “but there have been some pretty bad fights among some of the girls.” One of her losses was due to a broken wheel, she said, and the other was a simple case of losing by a lap to Lizzie Glaw. “I went and gave her a glad hand, however, as I knew she won it fairly.”
Tillie also spoke enthusiastically of her healthy lifestyle, showing not the least concern with breaking down or wearing out. “I take excellent care of my health,” she said, “whether I am racing or not.” Perhaps she was thinking of Dottie and Lizzie when she added, “If all of the girls would do that, I think many of them would ride better.” She said she avoided fatty foods in favor of anything that would build bone and muscle: “I jump rope for exercise and eat a great deal of very rare steak.”
Surely many details the women shared—their frank interest in money, their training regimens, their casual attitude toward injuries—struck Darling’s readers as unladylike, to say the least. Darling herself seemed most struck by the women’s sheer physicality. “When I worked in the office,” Lillie explained, “I was called little; you could have spanned my waist, and see”—she rose from her seat and wrapped her large hands around her waist—“you couldn’t do that now.” Her stride, Darling wrote, “was that of an athlete,” and her overall manner “gave the impression that she could fight for her rights.” In conversation, Lillie seemed eager to “punctuate her remarks in a way that would be remembered.”
Ida also referred casually to her own body. “You see I am quite fleshy now,” she said, inviting Darling to take a look. It was Tillie, though, who appeared most pleased and easy with her body as it was. Darling asked her if she ever felt worn out after a race. “Oh, no,” Tillie said quickly. “I’m solid muscle.” To prove it, she stood and pushed up the sleeve of her dark gray bathrobe. “See,” she said, flexing her bicep and smiling.
“Her muscles,” wrote Darling, as if lamenting the end of civilization as she knew it, “stood out as brawny and solid as a blacksmith’s, and it showed what woman, lovely woman, could bring herself to.”5