“You might be always impartial. This absolute freedom of the bike owner will be identified solely to the initiated,” Maria Ward wrote in her blazing 1896 manifesto Bicycling for Ladies, celebrating the bicycle as an instrument of emancipation, self-reliance, and unselfconscious pleasure a yr after the New York World revealed its tragicomical list of don’ts for women on two wheels.
These may appear to be amusing specimens from the fossil file of tradition, however they encode the broader and darker historical past of regulating girls’s sovereignty of sinew and spirit — our autonomy of over our personal our bodies: how we transfer them by means of the world and the way the world strikes by means of them. At present, with neuroscience lastly affirming what the poets and philosophers have lengthy identified — that consciousness is a full-body phenomenon, or as Walt Whitman memorably put it in Maria Ward’s time, that the body is the soul — it’s extra plainly evident than ever that regulatory management of the physique is a bid for management of the thoughts, of the soul, of consciousness itself.
That’s what visionary composer and National Sawdust founder Paola Prestini explores with magnificence and enchantment in her piece Biking By Time, which I had the pleasure of seeing carried out dwell by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus — the constellation of younger individuals who, a number of springs earlier, dropped at life David Byrne’s countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.
Anchored in three historic artifacts — this “map of woman’s heart” from the primary half of the nineteenth century, satirizing Victorian gender stereotypes; the aforementioned list of don’ts for women on bicycles from the tip of the nineteenth century, which incorporates dicta like “don’t faint on the street,” “don’t scream if you happen to meet a cow,” and “don’t attempt to journey in your brother’s garments to see the way it feels”; and these rules of conduct for women, pinned on the door of a Spanish church within the Nineteen Sixties, which decree that “no respectable girl or lady is ever seen on a bicycle” — the piece then time-travels to “the land of the free,” synthesizing a number of the legally sanctioned don’ts for American girls within the Seventies: no bank cards, no Ivy League schooling, no safety from sexual harassment within the office, no authorized entry to contraception.
Punctuating the incantations of what girls could not do is the sudden, hanging, virtually ironic refrain line:
You could journey a motorcycle!
No… no… should comply along with your husband.
You could journey a motorcycle!
No… no… should comply along with your husband.
You could journey a motorcycle!
No… no… no… no… no… no… no… no…
All of a sudden, the piece turns into a form of cultural elegy, within the traditional sense of celebration and lamentation fused into one, reminding us simply how lengthy the arc of progress is, how a lot of what we take without any consideration right now is the hard-won victory of generations previous (as I spotted afresh, having ridden my bicycle to the nineteenth-century fishery turned occasion area the place the younger individuals sang), and the way, as Zadie Smith noticed in her electrifying meditation on optimism and despair, “progress isn’t everlasting, will at all times be threatened, should be redoubled, restated and reimagined whether it is to outlive.”
Complement with “Thrush Song” — the haunting choral tribute to Rachel Carson, on which Paola and I collaborated for the 2020 Universe in Verse, dropped at life by one other constellation of younger voices — then revisit the trailblazing life and artwork of Alice Austen, who mounted fifty kilos of images gear on her bicycle to grow to be a pioneer of avenue images and the nineteenth century’s foremost documentarian of queer tradition.
