We’ve believed some weird shit under the guise of ‘yeah sure it’s totally medicine,’ but transportation based ailments were a new one for me.
Today’s Moment of Science…the Bicycle Face.
The earliest bicycles started popping up around the turn of the nineteenth century. In the 1870s the penny farthing with its giant front wheel was in its heyday for a joy ride, but that came with problems. It wasn’t all that sturdy, it tipped over if you hit a mid-sized ant hill, and it was damn near inaccessible for women consigned to wearing the giant dresses of the time. Then in 1885, John Kemp Starley cooked up the safety bicycle, employing the now-familiar chain drive to the rear wheel, a design that exploded in popularity.
With bikes that were now more accessible than ever for women, they represented newfound freedom and started being looked at more as transport. Though still fully covered up, womens’ clothes in this era were designed more functionally and practically. These new clothes allowed more freedom of movement, and scandalously, included pants.
But a mysterious ““illness” started being diagnosed.
Bicycle Face.
Yes, you too could be afflicted with a case of the dreaded Bicycle Face if you found yourself tangling with those derelict cyclists.
Afflicting mainly women, symptoms could include a look of exhaustion with bulging eyes, a flushed complexion, and harsh wrinkles. Those were just the beginning- if you started to get that look, it meant you were prone to so many other problems from the shenanigans you’d gotten up to on two wheels.
Kyphosis bicyclstarum, or cyclist’s scoliosis, was surely coming eventually. Tachycardia, anemia, eyestrain, nervous breakdowns caused by the stress from constantly having to balance? Apparently all risks of cycling in the late 1800s. Hysteria, pelvic inflammation, fetal malformation, and being a dirty sinner with that bicycle seat? Lock up your daughters now.
There were reportedly rumors of “overdeveloped muscles” crippling dancers and all that cardio work leaving actresses breathless, unable to deliver their lines. Funny how this machine could make women both too strong and too weak to function simultaneously.
Obviously, Bicycle Face wasn’t an affliction anybody really caught from cycling.
It was an affliction that society doled out, mainly to women who wanted freedom of movement. Use that bicycle, sure, but use it too much and you’re going to look like a mannish old hag with a crooked spine. No man will want you if you travel faster than fifteen miles per hour, that’s just science.
Within just a few years of the term being conjured out of thin air, Chicago based physician and equal rights advocate Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson put the kibosh on this bullshit. She published an article pointing out that any ‘face’ was from anxious beginners learning to ride, and had no link to the rest of this fuckery.
Susan B. Anthony said of bicycling, “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” It’s little wonder they warned people it would turn us into sluts.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, now referring to o-faces as bicycle faces.
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