Female emancipation- 女性解放

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The diamond-frame safety bicycle gave women unprecedented mobility, contributing to their emancipation in Western nations. As bicycles became safer and cheaper, more women had access to the personal freedom they embodied, and so the bicycle came to symbolize the New Woman of the late 19th century, especially in Britain and the United States.
Woman with bicycle in Place d'Italie (Paris)

The bicycle was recognized by 19th-century feminists and suffragists as a "freedom machine" for women. American Susan B. Anthony said in a New York World interview on February 2, 1896: "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood." In 1895 Frances Willard, the tightly-laced president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote a book called How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, in which she praised the bicycle she learned to ride late in life, and which she named "Gladys", for its "gladdening effect" on her health and political optimism. Willard used a cycling metaphor to urge other suffragists to action, proclaiming, "I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum."

Male anger at the freedom symbolized by the New (bicycling) Woman was demonstrated when the male undergraduates of Cambridge University showed their opposition to the admission of women as full members of the university by hanging a woman bicyclist in effigy in the main town square. This was as late as 1897. The bicycle craze in the 1890s also led to a movement for so-called rational dress, which helped liberate women from corsets and ankle-length skirts and other restrictive garments, substituting the then-shocking bloomers.


轉載自: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle

鑽石車架安全自行車賦予婦女前所未有的流動性，有助於其在西方國家的開化。在單車演變為更加安全和低價位商品時，更多的婦女擁有夢寐以求的自由，也因此單車來到了象徵著新女性的19世紀後期，特別是在英國和美國。
女子騎著單車在德意大利廣場（巴黎）

19世紀的女權主義者公認單車為女性的“自由機器”。 1896年2月2日紐約世界採訪，美國蘇珊灣安東尼說： “讓我告訴你，我對單車的想法。我覺得單車比世界上任何事物都給予女性更多的解放。它給女性自由的感覺和自主權。我看著一位女性騎著單車...這是一個自由的象徵，不受限的女人。 “ 1895年弗朗西斯威拉德，嚴格費城總統婦女基督教戒酒聯合會，寫了一本書叫做我如何學會騎單車，她讚揚了她在晚年所學會騎乘的單車，並命名為 “樂活號”就其“促使快樂的效應,帶給她的健康和政治觀更多正面的元素"。威拉德用自行車隱喻鼓吹其他女性主義者採取行動宣布， “我不會浪費我生命在人與人之間的摩擦，因為它可以是一種動力。 ”

新的（單車）女性以及男性面對自由象徵的憤怒表露無疑，男性劍橋大學生於主要城市廣場絞刑一名女子騎乘單車的肖像。這是在1897年當時。1890年的自行車熱潮也引發了所謂合理著裝的女性運動，幫助脫離馬甲和長裙和其他限制性服裝，取而代之的是在當時震驚一時的七分褲。