On June 25, 1894, Annie Cohen stood before a crowd of friends, curious onlookers, and suffragists at the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Claiming she was to cycle around the world to settle a wager, and armed with a pearl-handled revolver and a knack for sensationalism, she climbed onto a Columbia bicycle and, according to The Boston Evening Transcript, “sailed away like a kite down Beacon Street.”

The New York World would later declare it “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman.” But Annie, who turned every Victorian notion of female propriety on its ear, became world-famous by another name, Annie Londonderry: a name borrowed from the first of many advertisers (the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire) that purchased space on her bike and her body, turning Annie into a roving billboard. 

My great-grandaunt Annie didn’t run away to join the circus—she became the circus, an audacious spectacle on wheels. 

The wager, she claimed, required her to make the circuit of the Earth in 15 months and to earn the enormous sum of $5,000 en route. As the first woman to attempt the feat, Annie was sure to make a splash, but turning the endeavor into a race against the clock created drama that was catnip to the press.

Annie was an utterly unlikely candidate for the journey. Save for a few lessons shortly before her departure, she’d never ridden a bicycle before. Even more startling, she was the married mother of three young children, all under the age of six, a fact she carefully concealed for most of her trip. 

To fully appreciate Annie’s cycling odyssey, and the worldwide fame it brought her in the mid-1890s, it’s important to understand how the women’s movement and the cycling craze of the same era played handmaiden to one another.

On February 2, 1896, shortly after Annie completed her journey, Susan B. Anthony told the famous reporter Nellie Bly that the bicycle had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” 

A new breed of woman was making her mark in the 1890s. “The New Woman” broke with convention by working outside the home, or eschewed the traditional role of wife and mother, or became politically active in the cause of women’s suffrage or other social issues. The New Woman saw herself as the equal of men.

As women took to bicycles, they discovered a newfound sense of freedom of movement, a freedom previously circumscribed by the cumbersome fashions of the Victorian era. Cycling required a more practical form of dress, and large billowing skirts and corsets started to give way to bloomers—baggy trousers cinched at the knee. 

But to some this change in dress, combined with women exerting themselves on the wheel, was not only a radical departure from the feminine ideal, but a symbol of the moral corruption of women, one that foreshadowed nothing less than the downfall of Western civilization. Indeed, when Annie was in Phoenix in June 1895, one elderly woman was so shocked to see her in “men’s pants” that she ran horrified into a shop muttering about the “depravity and boldness of the 19th-century girl.” There was even concern that riding a bicycle would be sexually stimulating for women—thus the wonderful lyric in Ride’s title song: “I hear the bicycle’s vibrations / cause unspeakable sensations / and set their private parts aglow!”

For leaders of the women’s movement such as Susan B. Anthony, the battle over women’s dress was a critical part of the battle for sexual equality and even the right to vote. “Why, pray tell me, hasn’t a woman as much right to dress to suit herself as a man?” Anthony asked a reporter in 1895. “[S]he has an equal right with a man to control her own movements.”

The bicycle not only changed women’s fashion, it also meant women no longer had to depend on men for transportation. It was all very threatening to men—the bicycle was disrupting the established social order—but it was all very liberating to women. 

Mastery of the bicycle as a metaphor for women’s mastery over their own lives was the message of Frances Willard’s 1895 book A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. Willard was one of the most famous women of her day, a leading suffragist and founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a mass movement of independent-minded, politically active women. 

At 53, Willard learned to ride a bicycle because, she wrote, “I wanted to help women to a wider world…from natural love of adventure—a love long hampered and impeded…[and] from a love of acquiring this new implement of power and literally putting it underfoot.”

Although Annie took advantage of these social trends—the bicycle craze and the women’s movement—to build her fame, her motivation for the trip was purely personal: she wanted out from under the oppressive burdens of motherhood and homemaking. For a woman of the 1890s it was absolutely radical. Annie was fiercely independent and unconstrained by the norms of her times. And as she made her way around the world, the hopes and dreams of countless women were riding with her. 

We take the bicycle for granted today, but in the latter part of the 19th century it was an utterly revolutionary and disruptive technology that propelled women on the path to social and political equality. Though Annie quickly faded into obscurity and remained there for more than a century, her story brilliantly illuminates a vital chapter in the history of women. I like to imagine her sneaking into the last row of The Old Globe to see that she hasn’t been forgotten after all.