Indeed, I found a whole philosophy of life in the wooing and the winning of my bicycle.
So said Frances E. Willard, who determined in 1892, at the age of 53, to learn to ride a bicycle. In 1895, she wrote a little book called “A Wheel Within A Wheel” about the experience, a delightful treatise filled with words of wisdom from this notable temperance worker and suffragette.
Frances says the first woman bicyclist she knew was a young German artist living in America named Bertha von Hillern, who had conquered the bicycle 15 years before Frances gave it a try. Because of her bicycling, von Hillern was considered by some to be “a sort of semi-monster,” says Frances - and indeed, when she herself decided to learn, Frances says she was told that “I should break my bones and spoil my future.”
“Not a single friend” encouraged Frances to learn to ride a bicycle except an “active-minded young school-teacher” named Miss Luther, who came several times to help Frances learn to ride. In her very first session, three young Englishmen - “all strong-armed and accomplished bicyclers, held the machine in place while I climbed timidly into the saddle.” Within a short time, however, Frances gained confidence and affectionately named her bicycle “Gladys,” for “the gladdening effect of its aquaintance and use on my health and disposition.”
Obviously a woman of great courage and energy, Frances Willard writes with humor about learning to ride, and speaks often of bicycling as a metaphor for life. Her book is an inspiring testament to bicycling’s timeless qualities; I was inspired by the fact that, at the same age as Frances (53) and over 100 years later, I felt many of the same things as she did when I began bicycling.
That which caused the failures I had in learning the bicycle had caused me failures in life; namely, a certain fearful looking for of judgment; a too vivid realization of the uncertainty of everything about me; an underlying doubt - at once, however (and this is all that saved me), matched and overcome by the determination not to give in to it. …
I finally concluded that all failure was from a wobbling will rather than a wobbling wheel. I felt that indeed the will is the wheel of the mind - its perpetual motion having been learned when the morning stars sang together.
For two months, Frances was only able to ride Gladys with assistance - someone who could help her get into the saddle and give her a good, strong push. Learning to mount the bicycle on her own became another great metaphor for Frances.
As has been stated, my last epoch consisted of learning to mount; that is the pons asinorum of the whole mathematical undertaking, for mathematical it is to a nicety. You have to balance your system more carefully than you ever did your accounts; not the smallest fraction can be out of the way, or away you go, the treacherous steed forming one half of the equation and yourself with a bruised knee forming the other. You must add a stroke at just the right angle to mount, subtract one to descend, divide them equally to hold your seat, and multiply all these movements in definite ratio and true proportion by the swiftest of all roots, or you will become the most minus of quantities. You must foot up your accounts with the strictest regularly; there can be no partial payments in a business enterprise like this.
Because most of us now learn to ride a bicycle as a small child, it’s easy to forget the profound difficulty of first balancing on a bicycle - and also the thrill, when slowly it becomes a thing of ease and, eventually, instinct. “A Wheel Within A Wheel” brings back childhood experiences like this, viewed through a unique lens of a 19th century, middle-aged woman with great insight and perception of women’s position in society.
Bicycling helped Frances break through all kinds of pre-conceived notions and prejudices of her time. An energetic temperance worker, it is particularly humorous to read of a transcendent experience Frances had while under the influence of ether after a fall from her bicycle.
Little by little, freeing my mind of all sorts of queer notions, I came back out of the only experience of the kind that I have ever known; but I must say that had I not learned the great evils that result from using anesthetics I should have wished to try ether again, just for the ethical and spiritual help that came to me. it let me out into a new world, great, more mellow, more godlike, and it did me no harm at all.
It took Frances three months, with 15 minutes of practice a day, to master Gladys. Although this may strike us today as a significant commitment, Frances viewed it in her usual pragmatic but philosophical way - that in just “thirteen hundred minutes, twenty-two hours, or to put it most mildly of all, in less than a single day, as the almanac reckons time… I had made myself master of the most remarkable, ingenious and inspiring motor ever yet devised upon this planet.”
Frances looked for moral lessons in every life experience, and after telling her story of learning to ride a bicycle, she had these simple words for her reader:
Go thou and do likewise!
