In olden times the women rode
As fitted one of subject mind:
Her lord and master sat before,
She on a pillion sat behind.
But now upon her flying wheel
She holds her independent way,
And when she rides a race with man,
’Tis even chance she wins the day.
—A. L. Anderson
As Annie pondered her options in Chicago, the wager clock continued to tick. The journey there had consumed three of the fifteen months she had been given to circle the globe, and she was a mere thousand miles from where she had started. It was beginning to appear that the “sugar king” who wagered against her had made a good bet. But who were the men who conceived this novel enterprise and started her on the road to Chicago? How was Annie chosen to settle the matter? Was there, in fact, a wager at all? Or was some other scheme afoot?
The inspiration for Annie’s journey likely came from an eccentric former Harvard student named E. C. Pfeiffer. In mid-February 1894, four months before Annie left Boston on her Columbia bicycle, Pfeiffer, using the pseudonym Paul Jones, set out from Boston on foot with nothing, not even a change of clothing, ostensibly on a wager of $5,000, to go around the world in a year, earning his way as he went. But on February 25, 1894, just two weeks after his departure, Pfeiffer had acknowledged his plan was a “fake.” “He said that there was never a cent of wager placed on the trip around the world, that he simply originated the plan to make money and gain notoriety,” said the Boston Daily Globe.
On the very same day the Globe reported Jones was a “fake,” a small headline in the New York Times declared, “A Woman to Rival Paul Jones.” Though Annie was not identified by name, she was clearly the subject of the story: “A Boston newspaper woman about twenty-seven years old, the wife of a Boston business man, will undertake to travel around the world, and at the end of fifteen months return to Boston with $5,000, after having paid all her expenses, The trip will be the result of a wager…and a part of the plan is to travel through cities on a bicycle and in bicycle costume.”
On the day Annie left the Massachusetts State House, some newspapers likened her to the discredited Pfeiffer: “Emulating ‘Paul Jones,’” said one headline; “Female Paul Jones on a Wheel,” said another. The unmistakable implication was that Annie, too, might be a schemer.
If indeed a wager was the catalyst for Annie’s trip, who was behind it? If it was all a publicity scheme, as some suggested, who, if anyone, was behind that? Or, had Annie, like Pfeiffer, simply devised the entire plan herself, using a bogus wager to add drama and intrigue to her undertaking?
ON JUNE 26, 1894, the Boston Post reported that, “Mrs. Kapchowsky [sic] says that she is backed by rich merchants, and refers to Dr. Albert Reeder.” The name John Dowe appears in two newspaper accounts much later—once just before the end of Annie’s trip and one shortly after its completion—as one of the bettors. Other than these few references, the men involved in the wager are never identified by name, but only as “two wealthy clubmen of Boston,” “two rich men of Boston,” “Stock Exchange men of Boston,” or as “two rich sugar-men of the Hub.”
No John Dowe is listed in any Boston City Directory of the mid-1890s. Was this merely a variant of John Doe, designed to point to no one in particular? Dr. Reeder, mentioned in several reports, is almost always described as an intermediary who held the wager stakes and who identified Annie as the woman to undertake the journey.
Albert Reeder’s medical office was in Boston’s Park Square and his medical specialty, as listed in the Boston City Directory for 1894, was the curiously named “curative movement.” Today, curative movement often refers to the use of motor activities to stimulate parts of the brain to help develop body awareness. It is sometimes used therapeutically with patients with autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and learning disabilities, though it has other applications as well.
Just what Dr. Reeder meant by the term is unclear, but there was in the 1890s a lively debate about whether cycling was beneficial or detrimental to a woman’s health, and many physicians took sides. Some, mostly men, argued that the exertion involved in cycling was too much for the frail female physiology. Others took the affirmative side, often with the financial “encouragement” of bicycle manufacturers. Whether “curative movement” suggests Reeder was a player in this debate is uncertain, and there is no other evidence to suggest this is where his interest in a woman’s around-the-world bicycle trip lay. Nor is there any evidence that hints at the reason for his involvement in Annie’s journey or how the two knew each other.
The Boston Post suggested right at the start of Annie’s journey that her claim to be on a wager was suspect: “There are those who say that Mrs. Kapchowsky [sic] is not doing this thing for a wager at all, but that remains to be seen.” And the Boston Journal reported, “The crowd [at the State House] were incredulous about her receiving any such sum as $10,000 upon her return. Many expressed the opinion that it was simply an advertising scheme from start to finish.” If Annie’s gambit was indeed a publicity stunt or advertising scheme, only one person stood to benefit more from the trip than she did, and that person was Colonel Albert Pope.
Colonel Pope was a leading industrialist of his age and one of Boston’s most prominent citizens. The Pope Manufacturing Company of Boston and Hartford manufactured, among other things, Columbia bicycles. There is one obvious sign of Pope’s involvement: Pope supplied Annie’s Columbia bicycle and his representative, Captain Peck, personally delivered it to the State House on the day of her departure. But whether Pope’s involvement went beyond using Annie’s trip to promote the Columbia brand is unknown.
Alonzo D. Peck was one of Pope’s longest-tenured employees, working in 1894 as the senior salesman in Columbia’s flagship store in downtown Boston. It was not unusual for Pope Manufacturing to give away bicycles for promotional purposes, but none of the hundred or more bicycles it gave away in 1894 was to be used for a purpose as audacious as Annie’s. And Peck was not simply a Pope employee. He was also the captain of the Massachusetts chapter of the League of American Wheelmen, an organization started by Pope in 1880 to promote cycling and lobby for the interests of cyclists, especially the improvement of roads, an effort that came to be known as the “good roads” movement. Incidentally, Pope had another motive here besides making roads more accommodating for cyclists. The Pope Manufacturing Company would soon be producing automobiles.
How Annie and Peck knew each other is unknown but, as an advertising solicitor for several Boston newspapers, Annie may well have known many people in the Pope organization, which devoted considerable resources to advertising the Columbia brand.
It was clearly in Pope’s interest to see Annie on a Columbia. The mid-1890s was the peak of the American bicycle boom and consumers were buying bicycles in large numbers. In 1897 alone, more than 2 million bicycles were sold in the United States, about one for every thirty people. A quality bicycle could be had for under $100. “Wheels,” as they were commonly called, were everywhere in the gay ’90s, as were “wheelmen’s clubs,” well-organized associations with newsletters, receptions, weekly outings, uniforms, and special meeting rooms. Bicycle paths were clogged with traffic on weekends, and newspapers were filled with cycling news and special columns for “wheelmen.” Hundreds of manufacturers were successfully profiting from the sale of the must-have vehicle. In all, some three thousand American businesses were involved, in one way or another, in the bicycle trade, including a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, owned by two brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who were using bike technology to tinker with another invention they were working on.
So popular was cycling that, by 1896, even Madison Square Garden proved too small to accommodate all those who wanted to display their wares at the Great Bicycle Exhibition. Balconies and three tiers of terraces for promenading above the Garden’s floor were constructed to expand the exhibition space. When the Garden’s electric lights were turned on, the effect, wrote one reporter, “was brilliant.” People in masquerade, human freaks, and other means were employed to attract visitors to the displays. “A Chinaman presides on the platform of a wheel known by its yellow frame. An Indian with his war paint on; a swell; a giant negro; a dime museum midget; a quartet of jubilee singers; a fat boy; young men in racing costume; allegorical figures that suggest the names of standard wheels; [and] a rambling tramp” contributed to the circuslike atmosphere that drew huge crowds to the Garden.
Cycling in the last decade of the nineteenth century was nothing less than “a general intoxication, an eruption of exuberance like a seismic tremor that shook the economic and social foundations of society and rattled the windows of its moral outlook.” Nowhere was this more evident than in the role of the “wheel” in the changing lives of American women. Indeed, the women’s movement of the 1890s and the cycling craze became so inextricably intertwined that in 1896 Susan B. Anthony told the New York World’s Nellie Bly that bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
Women, though taking to the sport as never before, represented an enormous, relatively untapped market Colonel Pope was determined to exploit. If a woman could make it around the world on a Columbia, the public relations value would be incalculable.
IT WASN’T ALWAYS easy for women to ride bicycles; the technology needed to evolve to pave the way for women such as Annie to seize the bicycle as a tool of personal and political power. Before the development of chain technology, which allowed a cyclist to transfer pedal power to the rear wheel, bicycle designers increased the speed by increasing the size of the front wheel to which the pedals were attached. The typical Ordinary, as these high-wheelers were known, had front wheels as large as five feet in diameter so the machine would cover more ground with each pedal revolution. It required extraordinary athleticism just to mount an Ordinary, let alone ride one, and accidents were common. Steering was difficult and even a small obstacle, a rut in the road or a large stone, could send the Ordinary pedaler, mounted many feet above the ground, head first over the front handlebars. Indeed, learning how to “take a header” safely was an essential skill.
In addition to facing these common hazards, women had the additional problem of mounting and riding an Ordinary in the long, heavy skirts that they were expected to wear in public. Though some women were racing Ordinaries as early as the 1870s, and a women’s version of the bicycle existed that seated the rider lower and further back, an Ordinary required more strength and athleticism than most women of the time could manage, as they were not, as a general rule, otherwise engaged in athletic pursuits.
In the late 1870s, the first so-called Safety bicycles appeared. Safety bicycles had wheels of equal size and a chain drive (a few models had a chainless “shaft drive”) that transferred power from the pedals to the rear wheel. At first derided by experienced wheelmen as designed for old men and women, the Safety quickly proved the superior design, both faster and more stable than the Ordinary, and remains the basis for bicycle design today.
Unlike the Ordinary, the Safety, ironically, was a bicycle ordinary people, including women, could easily ride. The Ordinary quickly became obsolete, and the Safety ushered in the cycling craze of the 1890s. “The safety bicycle fills a much-needed want for women in any station of life,” said The Bearings, a cycling periodical, in October 1894. “It knows no class distinction, is within reach of all, and rich and poor alike have the opportunity of enjoying this popular and healthful exercise.”
AS CYCLING’S POPULARITY exploded, a new breed of woman was making her mark in the 1890s. The “New Woman” was the term used to describe women who broke with convention by working outside the home, or eschewed the traditional role of wife and mother, or became politically active in the suffrage movement or other social issues. The New Woman saw herself as the equal of men, and the bicycle helped her assert herself as such.
With the advent of the bicycle, women not only gained physical mobility that broadened their horizons beyond the neighborhoods in which they lived, but they discovered a new-found sense of freedom of movement, a freedom previously circumscribed by the cumbersome fashions of the Victorian era as well as by Victorian sensibilities. The women who raced Ordinaries in the 1870s often did so in risqué garments that exposed a daring amount of flesh. Arms and legs were often bare and the outfits were low-cut at the breast. Such scandalous dress was criticized by many who could not abide a spectacle that combined overt sexuality and physical exertion by women. Yet these women were the vanguard of a dress reform movement catalyzed in no small measure by the increasing popularity of the bicycle. They simply wanted clothing better suited to the pursuit than was their traditional Victorian garb. The restrictive clothing of the era—corsets, long, heavy, multilayered skirts worn over petticoats or hoop, and long-sleeved shirts with high collars, the clothing in which Annie began her journey—inhibited freedom of movement and seemed to symbolize the constricted lives women of those times were expected to lead. Such clothing was inimical to even modest forms of exercise or exertion. Cycling required a more practical, rational form of dress, and so the restrictive skirts and corsets gradually gave way to bloomers—baggy trousers, sometimes called a divided skirt, cinched at the knee. Although bloomers first appeared decades earlier, and a major social battle was waged over their propriety, the cycling craze practically mandated changes in women’s attire for any woman who wanted to ride.
“[C]lothing for sports engaged a wide variety of women in a discussion about their relationship with their garments,” according to women’s history scholar Sarah Gordon. “At a time when mainstream women rarely challenged fashion’s dictates, the novelty of sports offered an opportunity to rethink women’s clothing.”
Annie eventually formed strong views on the matter. “Miss Londonderry expressed the opinion that the advent of the bicycle will create a reform in female dress that will be beneficial,” reported the Omaha World Herald, when the cyclist passed through there in August 1895. “She believes that in the near future all women, whether of high or low degree, will bestride the wheel, except possibly the narrow-minded, long-skirted, lean and lank element.”
But dress reform was not a simple matter of practical adaptation; it rewrote long-standing definitions of modesty and femininity, and became a hotly contested moral issue. Cycling attire, and indeed the popularity of cycling among women, forever altered public perceptions of female athleticism and proper female behavior. The prim and proper gentility expected of women yielded to an acceptance that they, too, could exert themselves on the bicycle while dressed sensibly for the activity and not only retain, but even enhance, their femininity. Once hidden under yards of fabric, women cyclists shed their old skins and emerged, quite literally, as “new women.”
In the course of her own journey, both geographic and personal, Annie would run the sartorial gamut as she transformed herself into a new woman: she started in long skirts and a traditional blouse and jacket, took to bloomers in Chicago, and later would eventually don a man’s riding suit for much of the trip, an evolution that symbolized the larger changes in women’s lives as expressed in the clothing they wore. Her choice of dress shocked some. For example, when Annie was in Phoenix in June 1895, one elderly woman was so shocked to see a female cyclist in “men’s pants” that she ran horrified into a nearby shop, muttering about the “depravity and boldness of the nineteenth century girl.” Cycling, and the dress reform that accompanied it, challenged traditional gender norms and “provided a space where women actively contested and rethought femininity,” and there is no better example of the phenomenon than Annie.
That bike riding might be sexually stimulating for women was also a real concern to many in the 1890s. It was thought that straddling a saddle combined with the motion required to propel a bicycle would lead to arousal. So-called hygienic saddles began to appear, saddles with an open space where a woman’s genitalia would ordinarily make contact with the seat. High stems and upright handlebars, as opposed to the more aggressively positioned “drop” handlebars, also were thought to reduce the risk of female sexual stimulation by reducing the angle at which a woman would be forced to ride.
Some critics warned the bicycle was harmful to a woman’s health, and all kinds of arguments were thrown up to try and discourage women from taking to the wheel. The fragility and sensitivity of the female organism was a common theme. An article in the Iowa State Register, typical of the times, warned that exposure during cycling to wet and cold “may suppress or render irregular and fearfully painful the menses, and perhaps sow the seeds for future ill health.” The manufacturers of various “cures” capitalized on fears that cycling could injure the kidneys, liver, and urinary tract, some even suggesting that what might begin as a minor side effect from the vibrations of the wheel could eventually lead to death. Warner’s Safe Cure made these claims in advertisements designed to look like ordinary newspaper articles. In the September 21, 1895, editions of the Chicago Times-Herald and the Kansas City Star, for example, Warner’s Safe Cure didn’t just warn women; men, too, were said to be at risk, and Warner’s was the cure.
But the constant warnings about cycling’s ill effects on women throughout the early 1890s also brought forth pointed rebukes, such as this one in the Chicago Daily News: “When woman wants to learn anything or do anything useful or even have any fun there is always someone to solemnly warn her that it is her duty to keep well. Meanwhile in many states she can work in factories ten hours a day, she can stand behind counters in badly ventilated stores from 8 o’clock to 6, she can bend over the sewing machine for about 5 cents an hour and no one cares enough to protest. But when these same women, condemned to sedentary lives indoors, find a cheap and delightful way of getting the fresh air and exercise they need so sorely there is a great hue and cry about their physical welfare.” Clearly, with the advent of cycling as a recreation for women, the gauntlet over woman’s rights had been thrown down.
For leaders of the woman’s movement, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the battle over women’s dress, waged in large part over cycling attire, was a critical part of the greater struggle for sexual equality and even the right to vote. “Why, pray tell me, hasn’t a woman as much right to dress to suit herself as a man?” Anthony asked a reporter in 1895. “[T]he stand she is taking in the matter of dress is no small indication that she has realized that she has an equal right with a man to control her own movements.” Stanton, sometimes referred to as “the first new woman,” also forcefully defended a woman’s right to dress as she pleased, a right asserted in the context of cycling. “Men found that flying coat tails were ungainly and that baggy trousers were in the way [when cycling] so they changed their dress to suit themselves and we didn’t interfere,” Stanton told a journalist in 1895. “They have taken in every reef and sail and appear in skin tight garments. We did not bother our heads about their cycling clothes, and why should they meddle with what we want to wear? We ask nothing more of them than did the devils in Scripture—‘Let us alone.’”
Despite Stanton’s admonition that men “let us alone” on the question of cycling attire, even the male-dominated medical profession weighed in. At the Mississippi Valley Medical Congress in Detroit in September 1895, cycling was endorsed as healthful exercise for men and women, but the delegates derided bloomers as “something outrageous” and “unanimously declared [the garment] to be an abomination and the cause of lowering their wearers in the eyes of spectators.” No medical reason was cited. In Norwich, New York, in 1895, a group of young men signed a written pledge promising not to associate with any woman who wore bloomers and to use “all honorable means to render such costumes unpopular in the community where I reside.” Their goal, never realized, was to build their movement into a “national anti-bloomer brigade.” Their effort was courageous, said the Chicago Sunday Times-Herald, tongue in cheek, for “[t]he wearers of the bloomers are usually young women who have minds of their own and tongues that know how to talk,” a description that would have fit Annie to a T.
The issue of women’s cycling attire became fodder for cartoonists, as well. In the August 25, 1895, edition of the Omaha World Herald, a cartoon published during Annie’s visit to Omaha was a caricature of Egyptian hieroglyphics; it depicted several Egyptian men at the “Rameses Club” watching with bemusement as a woman cycles by in baggy pajama-like trousers. “The New Woman of Ancient Egypt,” says the top caption; “First Appearance of Bloomers on the Streets of Karnak,” reads the bottom one. Another cartoon, published during Annie’s visit to San Francisco, showed a woman whose loose-fitting bloomers had been filled with air by the rushing wind, her legs and hindquarters floating above the bike. But for her grip on the handlebars she’d have sailed away. “Her bloomers were too loose,” stated the caption, implying that the woman, too, might be loose.
As Annie rode, she encountered all of these preconceptions and misconceptions about both the sport and its attire, and became a figure onto which men and women could project their hopes and their fears about changing gender roles.
THE SOCIAL CHANGES wrought by the bicycle were hardly limited to women’s fashion, however. A woman with a bicycle no longer had to depend on a man for transportation—she was free to come and go at will. She experienced a new kind of physical power made possible by the speed of the vehicle. The bicycle imparted a parity with men that was both new and heady. In short, “more and more women came to regard the cycle as a freedom machine.”
Indeed, mastery of the bicycle as a metaphor for women’s mastery over their own lives was the message of Frances Willard’s 1895 book, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. Willard was one of the most famous women of her day, a leading suffragist and founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which had a mass following of independent-minded, often politically active women. At age fifty-three, Willard resolved to learn to ride a bicycle because, as she wrote, she “wanted to help women to a wider world…from natural love of adventure—a love long hampered and impeded…[and] from a love of acquiring this new implement of power and literally putting it underfoot.”
“The occasional denunciation of the pastime as unwomanly, is fortunately lost in the general approval that a new and wholesome recreation has been found, whose pursuit adds joy and vigor to the dowry of the race,” wrote Marguerite Merington of cycling in Scribner’s Magazine in June 1895. “Having reached these conclusions, the onlooker is drawn by the irresistible force of the stream. She borrows, hires, or buys a wheel and follows tentatively. Her point of view is forever after changed; long before practice has made her an expert she is an enthusiast, ever ready to proselyte, defend—or ride!” And ride they did. Between 1891 and 1896, it is estimated that the number of female cyclists grew between one hundred and four hundred times, with 1.3 to 3.2 million female cyclists in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany by the end of that period.
Annie was hardly the only woman taking to the highways on a bicycle. A few, such as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, had already made lengthy journeys by wheel. Pennell, a writer with a strong interest in women’s rights, and her husband, Joseph Pennell, spent their honeymoon in 1884 riding a tandem bicycle from London to Canterbury. Later that year, the Pennells rode a tandem tricycle from Florence to Rome, arousing great curiosity along the way. Two years later, in 1886, the Pennells, now astride Safety bicycles, toured Eastern Europe.
Fanny Bullock Workman of Worcester, Massachusetts, also made long-distance tours by bicycle with her husband, physician William Hunter Workman. For ten years beginning in 1889, the Workmans toured Europe, Africa, and Asia by bicycle. Unlike Annie, however, Fanny Workman was independently wealthy and, like Elizabeth Pennell, always traveled with her husband. Mrs. Workman always rode in proper Victorian attire, a high-necked blouse with full sleeves and “voluminous skirts” under which she wore a corset and a complete array of undergarments. In the spring of 1894, as Annie prepared to leave Boston, the Workmans were cycling 1,500 miles across the inhospitable terrain of Algeria. The following spring, as Annie was making her way down the California coast, the Workmans were riding 2,700 miles through Spain.
In the summer of 1895, as Annie pedaled through the American West, another Boston woman, Mrs. J. M. Savage, was riding more than 5,400 miles in and around New England, including twelve “centuries”—rides of one hundred miles. By the following year, Boston women had formed no fewer than four cycling clubs of their own, since the vast majority of cycling clubs did not permit women members. Cycling was now a mass phenomenon and not the province of a few well-heeled women or even of the so-called New Woman. “[A]ll sorts and conditions of woman have enrolled themselves among [cycling’s] devotees,” said the Boston Daily Globe. “The timid woman has cast away her fear, the stickler for proprieties has overcome her scruples, and the conservative has become a radical advocate of the merits of the wheel—it looks as though the whole feminine world, which does nothing by halves and is ever ready to follow a popular fashion, had gone wheel mad.” Indeed, as many famous women joined the ranks of cyclists, the actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lillian Russell among them, it served to further accelerate the passion for cycling among women.
Although Annie wasn’t among the first women to ride a bicycle, nor the first long-distance female cyclist by any means, until June 1894, no woman had ever attempted to cross the United States on a bicycle, let alone circle the world alone on one. In this regard, Annie was both a product of the times and in the vanguard of them, as well. For unlike Fanny Workman and Elizabeth Pennell, she rode without her husband and with a purpose much different than the comfortably situated Pennells and Workmans: she rode for money, for fame, and for freedom. And if Annie and the new Woman were about anything, they were about personal freedom.
WHAT ALL OF THIS meant for Colonel Albert Pope was a huge and growing women’s market for bicycles, a market being competed for by hundreds of manufacturers. Being associated with Annie’s trip, especially if successful, would be an enormous public relations coup. But, did Pope, or his company, do anything more than provide Annie’s bicycle?
In late December 1894, one French newspaper reported that Annie had, “made an arrangement with a manufacturer who consented to initiate her into the sport [of cycling]. This man of industry, in return for the commitment that she would not ride any other brand during the entire course of her voyage, gave her a machine and 500 dollars.” If the report is true then the “man of industry” was surely Pope and the “machine” was Annie’s Columbia.
There was also precedent for Pope’s involvement in around-the-world bicycle travel. He had provided the Columbia bicycle on which Thomas Stevens made the first successful around-the-world bicycle trip in the 1880s. Indeed, Pope had not only supplied the bicycle, he had funded the trip, albeit indirectly, by ensuring Stevens received payment for articles about his trip from another Pope entity, Outing magazine. (If the colonel had paid Stevens directly, it would have called into question Stevens’s amateur status. Pope was eager for people to see cycling as a popular, amateur sport, not one limited to professionals.) Stevens, ever grateful for Pope’s support, dedicated his lengthy 1887 book, Around the World on a Bicycle, to the manufacturer.
But, while it is clear that Pope had a hand in Annie’s adventure, it likely amounted to little more than providing a bicycle to a young woman who had an obvious knack for publicity and might help him reap a public relations windfall. There was nothing to lose, from his point of view. But, there is simply no evidence that Pope or his company conceived or sponsored Annie’s trip in any other way.
Annie would prove to be such a master at advancing her own goals, so adept at creating sensation, and so skilled at building her own legacy, it strains credulity to believe that this anonymous Jewish working mother of three small children from the tenements of Boston was somehow plucked from obscurity to settle a bet, especially in Boston, a city where, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote, “anti-Semitism seems to have reached its American pinnacle.” Furthermore, Annie wasn’t active in the woman’s movement, so how would she have come to the attention of bettors seeking to settle an argument over the capabilities of women? Annie was not the Billie Jean King of her time, but she was clever enough to read the social trends of the 1890s and to exploit them, quite brilliantly, for her own purposes. Thus, the most plausible explanation of Annie’s radical decision to use a bicycle to trade one life for another is that she concocted the entire scheme herself, persuaded Pope Manufacturing to supply her wheel, and, like E. C. Pfeiffer, alias Paul Jones, used the story of a wager to sensationalize her trip.
Though her scheme already had a grandiose twist—she would attempt to be the first woman to circle the world by wheel—positioning her trip as taken to settle a wager about women was a brilliant device. First, it turned a bicycle trip into a dramatic race against time: Would Miss Londonderry meet the deadline? Would she win the bet and reap the $10,000 prize? Would she prove some male chauvinist back in Boston wrong and, in the process, cause him to lose a large sum of money? Plus, by making the wager one that rested on and tested the capabilities of the New Woman, Annie ensured that both men and women, whatever their views on sexual equality, would have a vicarious stake in the outcome. Newspapers of the day devoted enormous attention to the New Woman and her doings, and by setting her trip up as a test of the New Woman, Annie greatly heightened her media appeal.
Annie was not alone in her use of the wager as a device for attracting attention. Indeed, around-the-world wagers in which the traveler was to earn a fixed sum and return within a specified time were becoming so commonplace by the mid-1890s that, on May 29, 1895, the Los Angeles Times commented, “Scarcely a week passes in which some person does not turn up who is bumming his way around the world on some asserted big wager that he will do it in a certain length of time, and sometimes in addition that he will collect so much money on the road. This style of beating one’s way…is getting very stale and tiresome.” Then, in an obvious reference to Annie, for she departed Los Angeles headed east on May 28 or May 29 of that year, the Times continued, “Of late even the ‘coming woman’ has gone into this line of business. It takes a good deal of faith in human nature to believe that there are so many people back East who are ready to wager thousands of dollars upon the feats of individuals, when they can never ascertain whether those feats have been properly performed or not. The globe circler has got to be as much of a ‘chestnut’ as the bridge-jumper and the forty-day faster, whether he starts with a paper suit and a cent in his pocket, or with a dozen trunks full of clothes and his pockets full of first-class tickets.”
Few, if any, who tried similar stunts came close to achieving the notoriety Annie did: some because the rigors of the journey proved too much, others because they lacked her gumption and talent for self-promotion. Whether newspaper editors and their readers truly believed she was traveling on a wager or not, Annie caught their attention wherever she traveled because she made such good copy and was creating a popular storyline that resonated with the public of the 1890s.
The wager, as Annie described it, placed her squarely in the middle of the broad public debate over women’s equality even though she had no personal history as an active feminist. She was quite unabashedly and adroitly exploiting the women’s movement of the time as a platform for her personal ambitions. From a modern perspective, however, Annie was certainly a feminist in her determination to fulfill her personal need for freedom and independence, and to realize her full potential as a woman by charting a truly radical course for herself unbound by social convention.
By setting herself up as a symbol of the New Woman, however, she was also assuming some heavy baggage: the hopes and aspirations of millions of women were riding on her handlebars. It might have been a burden had her motives been political. But because her motives were at first purely personal, this extra baggage would not slow her down. Rather, it ensured that as she went people would take notice, lend their support, and, in some cases, empty their pockets to help ensure her success. And, if there were times during the ride when she was about to give up, the fact that she was no longer riding for herself may have provided just enough motivation to keep her going.