Research paper: ‘Riding like a girl’: Women and cycling on film.

Bicycles appear throughout the history of the cinema from the 1890s onwards and women cyclists appear in many of these films. Films that depict women and girls on bikes are often centrally concerned with the emancipatory potential of this machine to mobilise the rider, giving her greater agency and independence. However, while the image of a woman on a bicycle is an enduring sign of the optimism of first-wave feminism, it is also an image laced with ambiguity, a symbolic threat to the established social order, and what is evident from a historical survey of images of women cyclists in visual culture is that this figure remains a troubling one. This paper will discuss some key films in which the themes of gender and women’s social status are explored through the figure of the female cyclist.