Sewing, Cycling, and Sociology

Kat Jungnickel’s research and writing explores alternative ways of thinking about the social dynamics of gender and technology. Her approach engages directly with the materiality of everyday life to open up a multidimensional rethinking of public space and gendered citizenship. Bikes and Bloomers is thus so much more than a history of women’s cycling in the late nineteenth century and the extraordinary efforts of female activists, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs who sought to address the “dress problem.” As Jungnickel observes, regardless of their social status or the scope of these efforts, the women she engages with “all pushed the parameters of established forms of mobile and gendered citizenship” (3). The book is of course focused on the extra ordinary—a cycling craze that spread across the nation, a patenting boom and a frenzy of invention and innovation, and the politics and pantaloons of the women’s dress reform movement—but this is always firmly...