The mass adoption of the safety bicycle by women in the 1890s, driven by manufacturers including Rover in Coventry, England, and Columbia in Hartford, Connecticut, created an urgent practical pressure for dress reform, including the loosening or abandonment of the corset. Women could not safely or comfortably ride bicycles while tightly laced, and the bicycle's enormous popularity — shared across class lines for the first time — made dress reform a mass rather than elite issue. Susan B. Anthony famously declared that the bicycle had 'done more to emancipate woman than anything else in the world.'

The bicycle provided women with both physical freedom and a new metaphorical register for feminist expression. Poets and essayists of the 1890s New Woman movement used the cycling woman — free, uncorseted, mobile, self-propelling — as an image of the liberated female creative spirit. The connection Susan B. Anthony drew between cycling and emancipation was adopted by poets who saw the unlaced body on a bicycle as a figure for the woman poet, freed from domestic constraints to move through the world.