In honor of the 100th anniversary of the passage of woman suffrage in New York State, the Geneva Historical Society's Spring Lecture Series is focused on Women’s Rights history. The second presentation in the series is a Public Scholars program brought to us by Humanities New York. Ellen Gruber Garvey will share “Women on Wheels: How Gilded Age Women Found Freedom through Bicycling, Fought Against People Who Tried to Stop Them, and Why It Matters Today” on Friday, April 7, 2017 at 7 p.m. This program, which is free and open to the public, is made possible through the support of the New York Council for the Humanities’ Public Scholars program.
When women and girls first rode bicycles in large numbers in the 1890s, they celebrated their new freedom to move around in the world. Susan B. Anthony said she stood and rejoiced, “every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.” She thought bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” Is it surprising that conservatives panicked at visions of women riding alone, with other women, or with unsuitable men, and campaigned to stop them?
Bicycling women did not want to give up their new mobility, though critics tried to stop them, arguing that bicycling could damage women's looks or reproductive capacities. Although this controversy seems like something from the distant past, women are often still discouraged from physical activity and mobility in the US and in other countries.
During this talk, Ellen Gruber Garvey will invite the audience to discuss ways they were encouraged to participate in physical activity or discouraged from it, and how they responded. We will also consider how the automobile, which followed the bicycle as an agent of individual mobility, has reduced Americans’ physical activity.
Ellen Garvey is Professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she co-edits the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. Her doctorate is from the University of Pennsylvania, her MA from the University of Massachusetts, and her BA from Empire State College, SUNY. Her recent book, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, has won four awards, including the Society of American Archivists' Waldo Gifford Leland Award and the Institute for Humanities Research Award.
The final lecture of the series will be “An Uncommon Union: Henry B. Stanton and the Emancipation of Elizabeth Cady” by Linda Frank on Wednesday, May 17. The Geneva Historical Society Lecture Series is supported in part by the Samuel B. Williams Fund for Programs in the Humanities. For more information about this program or the series call the Historical Society at 315-789-5151 or visit www.genevahistoricalsociety.com.
The Geneva History Museum is located at 543 South Main Street and is open Tuesday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturdays 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. Parking is available on the street or in the lot at Trinity Episcopal Church.
