Claiming the Bicycle

“Sarah Hallenbeck’s Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America is a fresh and masterful piece of scholarship that will make significant interventions to the fields of feminist rhetorical studies and histories of technical communication in particular as well as rhetorical historiography writ large. Claiming the Bicycle is impressive in regard to the depth and detail of the examples Hallenbeck draws from to compose her arguments, as she astutely analyzes literary narratives, instructional manuals, medical texts, and much more. Finally, the unique character of the conversation propelling the bicycling craze Hallenbeck studies is just fabulous. Who wouldn’t want to learn about Frances Willard as a bicyclist, bicycle courtship narratives, and the dangers of ‘bicycle face’? Claiming the Bicycle is not just an intellectually rigorous and provocative work but also a joy to read.”—Jessica Enoch, associate professor and director of academic writing at the University of Maryland

"Sarah Hallenbeck offers an engaging peek into the past by situating the bicycle within historical feminist rhetoric. Her text examines the evolution of the bicycle from the masculine and risky Ordinary to the feminine and more accessible Tricycle to the modern and popular Safety. As more women began to ride the Safety, Hallenbeck discovers, they answered the call for feminine accommodations to the machine. As women embraced this new technology, they discovered a need to invent bicycle accessories and write patents for those new inventions. The growing popularity of bicycles created a trend for whimsical stories of the “Bicycle Girl” along with a space for new authority and rhetorical agency among women riders and writers. Hallenbeck effectively argues that nineteenth-century women’s use of the bicycle creates an intersection of rhetoric, gender, and technology as women participated in both the use of the new technology and the technical communication that surrounded the bicycle. "—Melissa Nivens, Composition Forum