and her little dog too

[opensummer]

notasupervillain  was asking about technologies that led to social justice and cmcmck  offered the bicycle as an example which I +1’ed. That would have been the end of it except I was thinking about the Wizard of Oz for some reason and I couldn’t connect the thoughts but knew they were related.

Thanks adhd.

Thankfully, I put together this morning, and think it’s interesting enough to share. I think the Miss Gulch was put on a bicycle deliberately in the Kansas sequence as a visual shorthand for the sort of woman who rides a bicycle- nasty threatening spinsters. We see her on the bike before she ever opens her mouth and wonder if that was signaling to the (1930s) audience what sort of person she was supposed to be.

During the twister we see Miss Gulch transform into the witch of the west and the bike transform into a broom, which visually links the two. It makes some sense, both are means of transportation for independent women but guess I’m wondering if that coding was deliberate? Any thoughts?

Bonus round: I’m racking my brain for a b&w or an older film where a female character appears on a bicycle besides the Wizard of Oz and while I'm pretty sure I've seen a photo shoot with Audrey Hepburn on a bike I can't remember any films before the sixties where there's a positive representation of a woman on a bicycle.

Comments

[isabellerecs]

I totally think that was a deliberate conflation between the nasty spinster's bicycle and the witch's broom. They did that very much on purpose, I think.

I was attempting to investigate whether there were any positive portrayals of women on bikes in the early cinema days and not only can I not think of any I'm having a difficult time searching for such a particular subject. Though I am running across many old newspaper articles talking about the new craze for women riding and it so bizarre to me because the authors of several of the articles describe these women in much the same fashion as a cryptid that is unknowable (when they could have freaking asked :P).

[opensummer]

I thought so as well!

I spent some time doing research on this and had much the same results as you. Lots of articles with the Inscrutable Wimmen doing their crazy thing but not much modern analysis on the subject and no comments on women on bike in film. There's a probably a thesis in there somewhere.