"Woman's Place in Letters" Eagle,Mary Kavanaugh Oldham,ed.The Congress of Women:Held in the Woman's Building,World's Columbian Exposition,Chicago,U.S.A.,1893. Chicago,ILL: Monarch Book Company,1894. pp.135-137. http://digital.library.upenn.e...
In "My Park Book", published in 1898, Annie Nathan Meyer gleefully recorded the joys of spinning through Central Park, New York on her bicycle. Among the pioneers of women’s cycling, she learned to ride in Central Park, deriving great satisfaction from “the spice and freedom [of] doing something in the face of society’s frown.” Having “invented a perfectly satisfactory wheeling costume, made over from a discarded skirt,” she enjoyed on long spins through the park with her husband, prominent New York physician Alfred Meyer. They often chose to ride in the early morning hours “before the advent of the watering cart” and “the parade,” i.e., the throngs of well-dressed folk strolling along the park’s paths later in the day, some of whom viewed bicycling as an unladylike pursuit...
She wrote...movingly about being in the park at that time, seeing deer “gravely meditating but a step from the cobblestones of the avenue...the whir of the partridge burst[ing] from the ground... sunlight filtering through the quivering birches...the odor of the moist,warm earth.”
In the chapter on cycling in the park, she recounts how the first women cyclers felt obliged to ride skillfully, “for a woman to have been seen wobbling helplessly about, or trying to run up a score of broken lamp-posts, would scarcely have conduced to popularize the sport for her sex.” But, for her, “a Nature-lover who has always sat at her feet — the wheel is merely a delightful means of getting there” ...unlike some of her friends, who “have an entirely different theory of wheeling (incidentally they have a different theory of life in general). To them the wheel is an end in itself;its charm lies solely in swift riding.”
Several of Mrs. Meyer's works can be read in free digital versions, including:
"Woman's Work in America"
--http://www.archive.org/details...
--http://catalog.hathitrust.org/...
--http://www.onread.com/book/Wom...
"Barnard Beginnings"
--http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook...
--http://www.archive.org/details...
The dominant sex; a play in three acts
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/...
"Woman's Place in Letters" Eagle,Mary Kavanaugh Oldham,ed.The Congress of Women:Held in the Woman's Building,World's Columbian Exposition,Chicago,U.S.A.,1893. Chicago,ILL: Monarch Book Company,1894. pp.135-137.
http://digital.library.upenn.e...
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This shows her more playful side:
In "My Park Book", published in 1898, Annie Nathan Meyer gleefully recorded the joys of spinning through Central Park, New York on her bicycle. Among the pioneers of women’s cycling, she learned to ride in Central Park, deriving great satisfaction from “the spice and freedom [of] doing something in the face of society’s frown.” Having “invented a perfectly satisfactory wheeling costume, made over from a discarded skirt,” she enjoyed on long spins through the park with her husband, prominent New York physician Alfred Meyer. They often chose to ride in the early morning hours “before the advent of the watering cart” and “the parade,” i.e., the throngs of well-dressed folk strolling along the park’s paths later in the day, some of whom viewed bicycling as an unladylike pursuit...
She wrote...movingly about being in the park at that time, seeing deer “gravely meditating but a step from the cobblestones of the avenue...the whir of the partridge burst[ing] from the ground... sunlight filtering through the quivering birches...the odor of the moist,warm earth.”
In the chapter on cycling in the park, she recounts how the first women cyclers felt obliged to ride skillfully, “for a woman to have been seen wobbling helplessly about, or trying to run up a score of broken lamp-posts, would scarcely have conduced to popularize the sport for her sex.” But, for her, “a Nature-lover who has always sat at her feet — the wheel is merely a delightful means of getting there” ...unlike some of her friends, who “have an entirely different theory of wheeling (incidentally they have a different theory of life in general). To them the wheel is an end in itself;its charm lies solely in swift riding.”
A Spicy Spin Through the Park? From the blog Golden Gate Park: View From the Thicket,Feb.1,2011
http://fromthethicket.wordpres...