Abstract
Imagine you are a Victorian woman wanting to cycle. What will you wear? Can you cycle wearing your normal attire that consists of a big long skirt and a tight corset? The skirt could potentially be caught on the cogs of the bike, which can be bad news for the skirt in the best-case scenario, and unsafe or even deadly for the cyclist in the worst-case scenario. Can you wear trouser-type garments? Potentially, although it is not considered appropriate, and you run the danger of being ridiculed or abused by passers-by. How can you, as a Victorian woman, cycle in a safe, comfortable, and yet elegant and accepted way? Bikes and Bloomers aims to bring to life inventions created to solve exactly this problem: finding a “happy medium” (p. 156) between ordinary clothing – considered appropriate but unsuitable for cycling – and cycle-specific clothes – appropriate for cycling, but not entirely accepted socially.
Why is it important to read a book on inventions of cycle wear that, frankly, is no longer needed? Is this not a niche subject? The editor of a popular science magazine seemed to think so when I pitched a book review of Bikes and Bloomers to him, as did a fellow female academic. At first glance, even cycling itself could be considered just a pastime for a minority of individuals and not of central importance to general society or to women specifically. But it is. The bicycle is a technology that helped women’s liberation, and this is a message that Bikes and Bloomers vividly conveys. The bicycle is not just a mode of transport but a vehicle for social change. And how can the bike lead to a change in women’s lives if they are not able to cycle, due to inappropriate clothing?
Bikes and Bloomers provides an illustrated history of the evolution of British women’s cycle wear, investigating the convergence of Victorian engineering and radical feminist invention. The book tells the tale of six inventors of clothes for female cyclists in Victorian Britain. These inventive women imagined, created, and wore radical new forms of cycle wear, patenting their inventive designs. As the author suggests, formal history is full of examples of male creators while women usually pass unnoticed and, as a result, sometimes there is very little information to be found about these women’s lives. However, the author makes an excellent attempt to piece together information about these women. The book explores the social, political, cultural and personal circumstances that might have contributed to their inventions. In doing so, it provides a fascinating discussion of the role of the social context surrounding the clothing inventions, asking: what do clothes and clothing inventions tell us about the societal power structures and restrictions, and what are the effects of these restrictions on creativity?
Drawing on this in-depth archival research and inventive practice, the author, Kat Jungnickel – a sociologist by profession and hobbyist seamstress – pieces together the factors influencing Victorian women’s creativity and innovation. Jungnickel delves into the patent archives and magazines of the time to find evidence of the social environment that encouraged these women’s inventions and details the social, political, and personal contexts from which the patents and their creators emerged, such as social class, family background, training, and occupation. Each patent is “interviewed” by the author and her colleagues. In other words, the author and her team recreated the clothes, and the author reflects on the recreation process and the experience of wearing the clothes. The book also contains photos of the women cycling while wearing these replicas.
The discussion of the lives of these inventors and their inventions reveals the material and ideological problems Victorian women faced. Clothes carry symbolism and can tell us much about power structures in society. Jungnickel shows that tight Victorian corsets and large skirts were an apt metaphor for societal restrictions and freedom-of-movement constraints imposed on women. Clothing is also indicative of the social position of the wearer. This point is vividly illustrated by a discussion of pockets as a symbol of power in that they allow an individual to carry their own money and other essential items, and thus be more independent. While men’s clothes contained pockets by default, women’s clothing did not. Instead, women had to create pockets, pass them down through generations, and hide them, sparking a great deal of creativity.
Bikes and Bloomers suggests that, in some ways, social oppression fostered creativity and agency to allow women to resist the constraints imposed on them. For instance, one of the women featured in the book, Henrietta Müller, a passionate suffragette, created a suit with three very visible external pockets, inventing something that not only enabled women to use a vehicle that made her more mobile, but also to display power. There were also many hidden pockets to enable women to carry things, thus allowing them to move around independently. Furthermore, Jungnickel notes, the garment would even allow a woman to cycle to Parliament and look formally dressed.
It is all very well learning about the history of certain Victorian inventions, but why is this interesting for feminist psychology? Bikes and Bloomers provides an analysis of the interplay between social and personal factors and their influence on the creativity of individuals who lived under considerable social constraints. It also demonstrates the exercise of agency within gendered constraints as women were able to use the expertise they were allowed, namely, sewing. This skill was considered gender appropriate and thus socially acceptable. Women were able to take this expertise into the public sphere, declare themselves inventors, and make something that enabled greater freedom for themselves and other women. This illustrates how the social environment can shape expertise and creativity.
Bikes and Bloomers is, in some ways, a more optimistic version of Virginia Woolf’s (1928) A Room of One’s Own. Woolf highlighted how oppression suffered by women constrained their creative endeavours. Women were often unable to write in their own voices, but when they did, she pointed out, their writing was disrupted by duties, resulting in angry writing (in the case of Charlotte Bronte) or very short chapters (in the case of Jane Austen). In contrast, Jungnickel provides a more positive outlook on women’s creativity despite, and perhaps because of, the discrimination and barriers they faced. The book shows how not only the bicycle but also women’s cycle wear became vehicles for social change in Victorian Britain, allowing women to fashion new and mobile public lives.
To conclude, Bikes and Bloomers is a fascinating book, allowing us to marvel at how creativity can flourish amid social repression and to take stock at how much has been achieved to date. The bicycle has been, and continues to be, a vehicle for positive social change. I expect that it will continue to power social change in relation to some of the biggest challenges of our time: social discrimination and climate change. Anyone interested in the potential of creativity, cycling and clothes to enable social change should read this book.
