Claiming the Bicycle

Tracing the role of nineteenthcentury women and rhetoric in transforming the bicycle

Although the impact of the bicycle craze of the late nineteenth century on women’s lives has been well documented, rarely have writers considered the role of women’s rhetorical agency in the transformation of bicycle culture and the bicycle itself. In Claiming the Bicycle, Sarah Hallenbeck argues that through their collective rhetorical activities, women who were widely dispersed in space, genre, and intention negotiated proper uses for the bicycle, destabilizing cultural assumptions about femininity and gender difference.

Making a significant contribution to studies of feminist rhetorical historiography, rhetorical agency, and technical communication, Claiming the Bicycle asserts the utility of a distributed or “collected” model of rhetorical agency and accounts for the efforts of widely dispersed actors to harness technology in promoting social change.