Check out the first bicycle made for women

A version of this article was first published on the Washcycle.

We’re in the middle of Women’s History Month. And, the District has a unique place in the world of women’s cycling as it was here that the “women’s bicycle” was invented and down Pennsylvania Avenue that women first publicly rode a true bicycle. To be clear, the inventor of the drop-frame is somewhat in dispute, but many ascribe it to one of two Washingtonians.

Before the invention of the safety bicycle there was the ordinary bicycle, the bike with one large wheel in the front - aka a “penny farthing” of “high wheel”, but it was exclusively used by men (some claim it was athleticism and balance, others clothing concerns and still others social stigma, that kept women off - but clearly women CAN ride them so the balance thing sounds like bunk). Women rode three or four-wheeled cycles or rode on some form of tandem with a man. But the invention of the safety bicycle changed all of that.

When the safety bicycle was invented in 1885, Washingtonian Herbert Sumner “Bert” Owen immediately saw value in it and had a pair imported to DC that year. They were among the first in America. A local bike builder by the name of William Elliot Smith was inspired. Smith and his family had emigrated from England in 1882 and it was there that he’d learned to build bikes. Smith and his brother, driven by their desire to share cycling with their five sisters, had been working on women’s bikes since 1884 and had patented a few tandems based on the ordinary. He and his wife were well-known for riding around town together on one.

But in the safety he saw a bike that women could ride on their own. When his wife tried to ride one, the crossbar got in the way of her skirt. So he came up with an idea for a drop frame bike that would serve ladies and with his partner Edward Baltzey they formed a company in DC to build them. It took them a year to perfect the design, but by January 1888 they had their first one.

On February 4th, 1888 they staged a ride down Pennsylvania Avenue - the first public ride of women on bicycles. Smith rode a tandem with a drop bar front with Miss Genevieve Wise and Smith’s wife Francis and Miss Ella Tageler rode standard ladies safety bikes. It became a national story. “A Spectacle” one paper reported.

“I saw a woman go by on a bicycle! On a bicycle I repeat…There was a flutter of lace and a flash of skirt…I blushed and turned my face resolved to gaze on the sight no more….They were dressed in all respects in the ordinary street costume of a lady. One wore a jaunty hat and the other a bonnet.” (sigh…helmet shaming already). Smith promoted the fact that the bicycles weighed about half as much as a tricycle and predicted they would be popular with women. He was right. And he said that Washington was the perfect place for them as it had smoother streets than other cities and was already home to 14,000 male cyclists.

“So woman is completing her conquest of the world” one story went, “She rows. She smokes. She preaches. She shoots. And now she has lassoed the iron grasshopper.” [The Iron Grasshopper sounds like a fancy cocktail, BTW]

Meanwhile, Owen was working on his own ladies bike. Owen was a local bicycle enthusiast - perhaps the most enthusiast of them all - and a bicycle importer and manufacturer. He was one of the founders of the Capitol Bicycle Club in 1879, the first club in the District and only the second in the United States. He was known as the first man to bike down the Capitol steps and was called the “Father of bicycling in the District.” He had made a tradition of hosting a long-distance ride on his birthday in early May, a tradition that continued even after he moved to New London to run his bicycle factory. The ride started during the days of the high wheel, which made the race particularly exciting and large crowds would turn out to watch the race end in a mile loop around the Capitol building.

Owen drew up some designs and in 1887 he built about 25 drop-frame bikes in his shop located at 1400 New York Avenue NW, where the Bond Building currently stands. They were the first such bikes according to Owen and some historians.

However, they probably weren’t the first. Others had already developed drop-frame bikes for older men, but not for women; or they had made drawings and gotten patents but never built anything. Dan Albone, inventor of the light farm tractor, actually built a drop-frame bike a year before Owen or Smith, which he intended to be used by women but it’s unclear if any woman ever rode it.

Owen taught some women to ride them, only in private, before Smith’s bikes were finished, but Owen didn’t pull the trigger. He was worried about public sentiment so he wanted to make sure that his ladies were expert cyclists before they hit the streets and that they looked presentable. “Every detail of posture and costume was carefully supervised,” he said.

That winter he went to the Starley Brothers factory in England where they made the Psycho bike and shared his designs which eventually became the ladies Psycho, of which he ordered some as well as some tandem bikes with a drop frame in the front. Worried that women wouldn’t feel comfortable riding alone, he thought lovers and brothers would use the tandem bikes to ride their sweethearts and sisters around, and maybe that would help to overcome the objections that he feared. As a result of Owen’s designs, the Starley Brothers presented their ladies bikes to the world on January 28th, just one week before the Smith ride, but there was no public ride.

Smith’s bike - later called the Dart - was an immediate hit in DC and both he and Owen began selling their bikes to the women of Washington. By April the first women’s bicycle club in the world, the Ladies Cycle Club of Washington, DC was formed. It started with 13 members but quickly grew to 50. It’s leader was Harriet H. Mills. Mills was a woman of high social standing and by recruiting other women of society to ride, she made it socially acceptable for others to follow suit. New women cyclists were formed as fast as Smith and Owen could provide them bicycles. Though Owen’s bikes were being made in England, English women did not take to them with the vigor the women of Washington did, and papers there predicted that women on bikes would be but a “passing craze.”

It wasn’t.

The bicycle has been credited with paving “the way for Women’s Rights” and suffragists would later declare that “woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle.” Whether Owen or Smith (or someone else) was the real first inventor, the first public ride (just down the street, not to suffrage yet) was on Pennsylvania Avenue. And so DC has a small and odd, but real, place in not just women’s cycling but in the history of women’s rights and equality.

Both Owen and Smith were granted patents for their bikes in 1888, but Smith is more often considered the true inventor of the ladies bicycle, in part because his design was better. Unfortunately for Smith, he was a better designer than manufacturer and wasn’t able to build bikes fast enough to make any money. In 1890 he went bankrupt and was bought out by Owen. Owen kept him on as the manager of Smith’s old factory at 809 Water Street until his death in 1894.

When Owen and his brother bought out Smith, he got control of all of Smith’s patents. In fact, Owen had briefly lent his first bike, pictured above, to the Smithsonian, but later needed it back for a patent lawsuit over one of Smith’s patents. That patent dealing with the bottom bracket became critical to the automobile industry and made Owen a fortune. Owen moved to Connecticut, bought a big house and then lost his fortune during the aviation boom and bust. He died in 1931 in his stately home in Stonington, CT, nearly penniless.

Harriet Mills, a respected and beloved music teacher and singer, died in 1912. Her first husband had been a prominent lawyer and her second the executive clerk on the Senate. She was buried in New Hampshire.*