Danger: Bicycles!

“I think bicycling has done more the emancipate women than anything else in the world,” said Susan B. Anthony.

Her companion in the struggle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said, “Woman is riding to suffrage on a bicycle.”

Certain physicians, like Philippe Tissie, warned that the bicycle might provoke abortion and cause sterility, while their colleagues insisted that this indecent apparatus might leave to depravity because it gave women pleasure when they pressed their intimate parts against the seat.

The truth is the bicycle gave women mobility, allowed them to leave the house and enjoy a dangerous taste of freedom. And it was the bicycle that sent the pitiless corset, which impeded pedaling, out of the clothes closet and into the museum.

  

~Eduardo Galeano, Children of the Days