Bike to School is Back

All aboard the Devil's Chariot

Author

Jason Wojciechowski
April 30, 2024

Every Wednesday this month, beginning tomorrow, May 1, the Safe Streets Committee will host Bike to School. Beware. If history is any indication, the bicycle might lead your young learner to radical ideas.

🚲 Bike to School 🚲
Don't have a bike? Roll with us any way you can! đź›´ đź›Ľ đź›ą đź‘ź 
🗓️ Every Wednesday in May! (5/1, 5/10, 5/15, 5/22 & 5/29) 
⏰ 7:25 AM at McCarren Track (corner of Driggs & Lorimer St)

The modern bicycle came into widespread use around the same time our school was built in the 1890s, and immediately men fretted over the corrosive effects of the “Devil’s Chariot.”

Rebellious women began wearing new bike-friendly clothes, meeting friends without a male escort, and going on long bicycle journeys. Women could travel alone, but even more dangerously…together.

“Maidens with disregard for convention,” 1895

Suffragists used bicycles to travel town-to-town organizing women. They also took over giant gymnasiums where women could learn to ride far from prying male eyes, plan activism, and learn self-defense. A fact men who tried to stop the riders learned when faced with women “noted for athletic powers,” using their “fists in a scientific fashion.” 

(Note: PS110 PTA does not condone violence)

From the United States to New Zealand, the freedom offered to women by the bicycle led to demands for more rights and a globally connected women’s rights movement.

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Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.

— Susan B. Anthony

The power of the bicycle to smash patriarchy still holds today. Women in Saudia Arabia are banned from doing so for sport or travel. Riding a bike as a woman is greatly stigmatized in Pakistan and forbidden in some parts.

A small group of Pakistani women in 2018 took to their bikes as part of International Women’s Day celebrations. The protest has led to the formation of cycling clubs for women all over the country that in turn led to mothers teaching their daughters to cycle. This year, thousands of women in the country rode their bikes on March 8. Today a sight can be seen in Karachi for the first time in decades…girls on bicycles.

So join the Safe Streets Committee for weekly bike-to-school Wednesdays, but beware! It may lead your young people to embrace fierce independence and join in the long history of bicycle riding world changers.

Also, there are pastries.

See You Soon,

— Jason and the PS110 PTA