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Bikes and bloomers : Victorian women inventors and their extraordinary cycle wear / Kat Jungnickel.

by Jungnickel, Katrina.

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Goldsmiths Press, 2018.

Women cyclists -- Clothing -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.

Women's clothing -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.

Cycling -- Social aspects -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.

9781906897758 (hc.)

Alternate title:

Victorian women inventors and their extraordinary cycle wear

xii, 323 p. ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The bicycle in Victorian Britain is often celebrated as a vehicle of women's liberation. But much less is known about another critcal technology with which women forged new and mobile public lives - cycle wear. Despite its benefits, cycling was a material and ideological minefield for women. Conventional fashions were wildly inappropriate, with skirts catching in wheels and tangling pedals. Yet wearing more identifiable 'rational' cycle wear could elicit verbal and sometimes physical abuse from parts of society threatened by newly mobile women. In response, pioneering women not only imagined, made and wore radical new forms of cycle wear but also patented their inventive designs. The most remarkable of these were convertible costumes that enabled wearers to secretly switch ordinary clothing into cycle wear. This highly visual social history of women's cycle wear explores Victorian engineering, patent studies and radical feminist invention. Underpinned by three years of in-depth archival research and inventive practice, this new book by Kat Jungnickel brings to life in rich detail the lesser-known stories of six inventors and their unique contributions to cycling's past that continue to shape urban life for contemporary mobile women."--From publisher.

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