A Wheel Within A Wheel
A Woman's Quest for Freedom
by Frances E. Willard
Applewood Books, 1997, 75 pages, $8.95
Frances Willard (1839 - 1898) was a pioneering American suffragist, and the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Her efforts at these pursuits eventually led to a woman’s right to vote in the USA, achieved in 1920, and to Prohibition, achieved a year earlier (and later repealed).
At the age of 53, she was given a bicycle and learned to ride it. This slim volume, first published in 1895, offers her thoughts and conclusions on what this meant to her, delivered in anecdotal, oft-prolix, orotund Victorian prose.
The book is a delight to read. Its original subtitle was “How I learned to ride the bicycle with some reflections by the way,” and it’s her reflections that provide the most delight.
Of her relationship with Gladys (her bike): “As we grew better acquainted I thought how perfectly analogous were our relations to those of friends who became slowly seasoned one to the other: they have endured the vicissitudes of every kind of climate, of the changing seasons; they have known the heavy, water-logged conditions of spring, the shrinkage of summer’s trying heat, the happy medium of autumn, and the contracting cold that winter brings; they are like the bits of wood, exactly apportioned and attuned, that go to make up a Stradivarius violin. They can count upon one another and not disagree, because the stress of life has molded them to harmony.”
She views her mastery of “the wheel” as a dynamic metaphor for the history she saw swirling past her and the emerging place for women in that swirl that she herself was helping to create. Her final sentence offers her ageless advice to all other women, from 1895 onward: “Moral: Go thou and do likewise!”
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