The feminine decimononic emancipation through the cycling courage

Abstract

This article aims to analyze, from a qualitative and quantitative point of view, the importance that the velocipede had for Spanish women of the nineteenth century, from a sporting, hygienic and therapeutic perspective as well as from the prism of the struggle for Social and civil rights. Not in vain, the bicycle was formed in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century as a common element of the struggle suffragist and feminist around the world, around which was proposed the reformulation of a kind of ideas such as women’s liberation, the democratization of the body, the presence of women in public life and their social projection through the agonistic sporting courage. The importance of this study lies in its intention to nest outside the walls, beyond the competition itself, making a symbolic reading of the society and the historical context of the nineteenth century. Choosing women as the object of our study entails the continuation of a tremendously relevant field within the research. It is an approach that can combine several fields of study: anthropological, historical, social and cultural, in an attempt to analyze gender relations at a particular stage in contemporary history.