Susan B Anthony was in her seventies by the time the bicycle was widely available to women, but she admired it all the same and said “a girl never looks so independent, so much as if she felt as good as a boy, as on her wheel." She was, in Susan’s words, “the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

Anthony meant that quite literally because until the 1890s, most women did not have the freedom to go beyond walking distance of their own homes. The bicycle changed everything.

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