Abstract

With its wide circulation and its resistance to old-fashioned morality, the popular magazine provided late nineteenth-century American women a location within which to counter doctors' long-held views of their physical frailty. In articles promoting the bicycle as an agent of women's health, nonmedically trained women countered medical commonplaces of women's limited energies and need for constant doctor scrutiny. Instead, they posited a renewable, self-governing female body capable of taking on both the bicycle and the challenges of the new century. In doing so, they influenced doctors' perspectives on women's bodies from outside professional boundaries.