ArticleAuthors: Eva Chen (2017)
As a Victorian form of transport, the bicycle is often linked with the New Woman and hailed as a harbinger of emancipation and public mobility for women, or a tool for female sartorial reform and physical improvement. This paper argues that until the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle, with its high cost and its association with the younger members of the upper-middle class, is also a tool of conspicuous consumption and fashionable display. As a crucial accessory of the much advertised, ridiculed but also emulated ensemble that constitutes the New Woman, the bicycle signifies her complicity with modern commodity culture, which, though entailing more opportunities and greater e... 
