I have just finished reading yet another murder mystery by Val McDermid, this one dealing with a body found preserved in a peat of in the highlands of Scotland along with a well preserved vintage motorbike, dating back to World War II. Someone had been murdered at some point between the end of the war and the present day as someone else tried to reclaim vintage war loot. A good, complicated tale.
Now, I’ve never been a great fan of motorbikes. A pushbike (a term I have not heard used for a good while) is a different matter altogether, much more controllable. Maybe it goes back to an occasion in my childhood when for some reason Brown Owl (as we called the leader of the Brownie Pack) insisted of giving me a lift home on the back of her Vespa motor scooter. It was not an experience I relished. We didn’t even wear helmets in those days. And certainly I have never felt any inclination to don leathers and ride around on a motorbike. My daughter, much bolder than I, went through a phase when she loved motorbikes. I seem to remember my brother-in-law taking her off to watch motorcycle races one year.
Anyway, when I went to the dentist’s recently, as I walked back from the clinic to the town centre I heard the roar of motorbikes and saw a veritable host of motorcyclists, quite aging motorcyclists, with their leather jackets emblazoned with a variety insignia. There was not a helmet to be seen. They all wore their longish hair tied back in ponytails of one style or another. What was going on? It was like a scene from the TV series Sons of Anarchy. I was tempted to take a photo but my viewing of some episodes of Sons of Anarchy warned me that these gentlemen might react badly to an invasion of this solemn ride. It was clearly a procession of some kind, making its slow and stately way along the street.
Eventually I saw what it was all about. Behind the motorcycle cavalcade came a hearse. The coffin was adorned with only one wreath and a motorcycle helmet. One of their motorcycling brotherhood (their chapter?) must have died and this was their tribute to him. Impressive!
Then this morning in a random item on social media I found a photo of two women on motorbikes, with the caption: “Adeline and Augusta Van Buren were the first women to travel across the United States on two solo motorbikes in 1916. They made it despite being imprisoned often for wearing trousers.”
What was that all about. I had to look it up.
It turns out they were sisters (descended by the way from then eighth president of the USA, Martin Van Buren, although that is irrelevant) and they weren’t the first but the second and third women to cross the continent by motorbike. The first was Effie Hotchkiss, who had completed a Brooklyn-to-San Francisco route the year before with her mother, Avis, as a sidecar passenger. It’s possible they were the first to do so wearing trousers though!
America was about to enter World War I, and the sisters wanted to prove that women could ride as well as men and would be able to serve as military dispatch riders, freeing up men for other tasks. For their ride, they dressed in military-style leggings and leather riding breeches, a taboo at that time. They were arrested numerous times, not for speeding or other motoring offences but because they were wearing trousers!
I was about to exclaim: Wow! Imagine not being allowed to wear trousers! But then, back in the 1970s together with some of the women I worked with we campaigned for, and eventually won, the right to wear trousers to work in the secondary school - provided the trousers were part of a “matching or co-ordinating trouser suit”. No casual jeans for us!
Despite succeeding in their trek, the sisters' applications to be military dispatch riders were rejected. Reports in the leading motorcycling magazine of the day praised the bike but not the sisters and described the journey as a "vacation". One newspaper published a degrading article accusing the sisters of using the national preparedness issue as an excellent excuse to escape their roles as housewives and "display their feminine counters in nifty khaki and leather uniforms".
So it goes!
Coincidentally, we are currently watching an Italian TV series about Lydia Poët, law graduate from Turin university towards the end of the 19th century, and her fight to be allowed to practice law - the first modern female lawyer in Italy!
Keep up the fight for equal rights, sisters!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment