Post

Across four or five years in the 1890s, Jules Beau's photographic albums contain 80+ images of women on bikes, three dozen different women in all. Some were society ladies, some theatre performers, some pro riders.

Obviously, it's the pro riders that interest me the most. Some of them I've written about in the past, in relation to the Hour record. Most rarely get mentioned by cycling historians. Forgotten as they are today, their memory lingered on after the 1890s. Here's Desgrange in 1921:

And here's Robert Dieudonné in 1932:

The narrative today is that, even in their time, these women were being ignored. But as the historical record shows, this simply is not true. For sure, you can argue less was written about them than their male counterparts. But they were not being ignored.

The historical record is how we know about what is generally believed to have been the first women's race in 1868

The historical record is how we know about the likes of Elsa Von Blumen and Louise Armaindo in the 1870s and the 1880s