Image: Alice Austen 1896. Collection of Historic Richmond Town Alice and her friends strived to be financially independent women who valued self-fulfillment and benefited from greater professional and educational opportunities. Alice’s circle of friends took advantage of the increased mobility afforded by relaxation in women’s dress. In 1896, Violet Ward published Bicycling for Ladies. The model, Daisy Elliott, was a gymnast and managed a gym for women in Manhattan. The images for the book were taken by Alice on a makeshift set in the lawn of Clear Comfort.

Image: Alice Austen 1896. Collection of Historic Richmond Town Maria E. Ward known as Violet and her circle of women friends who contributed to Bicycling for Ladies were in a league all of their own. They were trailblazers, breaking away from the constraints of their Victorian environment to forge independent lives that broke boundaries of acceptable female behavior and social rules. The original cover of Bicycling for Ladies is a rich blue with golden highlights depicting a woman at its center, wearing bloomers, kicking her feet forward with her hat flying off as she revels in cycling alone down a country road. This representation of independence and athleticism suggests the possibilities of new freedoms and exciting adventures for women in the Victorian era. This newfound independence is celebrated by Ward in her writings which move beyond the instruction of proper riding form to explore understanding the mechanics of the bicycle and the tools used to maintain and fix them. Sharing Ward’s enthusiasm for new technologies was her close friend Alice Austen. Austen was a skillful photographer and on a makeshift set on the lawn of her Staten Island home, she took the photos that richly illustrate Ward’s book. The model, Daisy Elliott, who shared Ward’s and Austen’s enthusiasm for sports was a gymnast and a manager of a sports facility for women in Manhattan. She was also Austen’s lover. There have been various interpretations of Bicycling for Ladies, but few explore the importance of its illustrations and the social relationships of the women who collaborated to create this landmark book. Ward and her friends strived to be independent women who rejected traditional Victorian women’s roles of marriage and motherhood. With her camera, Austen documented the connection between women’s physical mobility and their personal freedom. Daisy Elliot is depicted here in strong athletic poses which we see appearing in several other bodies of Austen’s photography. Austen was introduced to photography at age 10 in 1876. A second-floor closet of her home on the shoreline of the New York Narrows Harbor served as her darkroom. In this home studio, which was also one of her photographic muses, she produced over 7,000 photographs of a rapidly changing New York City, making significant contributions to photographic history, documenting Victorian women’s social activities, New York’s immigrant populations, and the natural and architectural world of her and her friends’ travels. One of America’s first female photographers to work outside of the studio, Austen often transported up to 50 pounds of photographic equipment on her bicycle to capture her world. In Austen’s letter archives, there are several correspondences from the period of Bicycling for Ladies publication between Elliot and Ward to Austen which reveal their adventurous travels and the intimate nature of their relationships. In an 1891 letter to Austen from her travels, Ward writes “ I only wish you were along, what fun we would have together. My camera is here and I hope to take back some work with me. Undeveloped of course. Did you succeed in securing some snow plates this year. What opportunities you must have had with this season of cold”. Elliot would write to Austen in 1897 “You know that I love you darling; there are many things I think of that I would like to do for you, yet, there is so little I really can. Whenever there is anything I could do, and don’t, please let me know; because there is nothing gives me more true pleasure than doing for one I love as I do you.” These women-led incredibly full, liberated, non-traditional lives which could be the subject of several volumes of books. Understanding this makes the reading of this book all the more interesting and pleasurable. Bicycling for Ladies can truly be viewed as an early marker related to the women’s liberation movement and an important piece of lesbian history.

Image: Alice Austen 1896. Collection of Historic Richmond Town Bicycling for Ladies has just been republished and is available here.