In the 1890s, reporters throughout the country published article after article documenting and debating the new bicycle craze. They were particularly concerned about the ramifications of women's bicycling on Victorian gender norms; many worried that bicycling would limit women's reproductive ability and turn them into masculine, radical political agitators unencumbered by traditional gender norms. Dress was a particularly explosive aspect of this debate, and the pants-wearing woman cyclist, symbolizing the most threatening potential of the bicycle, was a common image in popular press cartoons that mocked women's activism (Marks 175). In 1894, a reporter for the New York Times summed up the disgust many Americans felt about this New Woman: "if there is one thing I hate ... it is a masculine woman ... She has made a half-way sort of creature of herself. She can't be a man, and she is a disgrace as a woman" ("Woman's wheeling dress"). It would be understandable to assume that a close-minded male journalist who was ignorant of women's beliefs about their cycling practices wrote this particular article. According to popular accounts, women's bicycling in the 1890s was personally and politically empowering for women. Sue Macy represent this sentiment in her recent history Wheels of Change, and some readers may be familiar with Susan B. Anthony's often-cited statement that bicycling has "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world" (qtd. in Bly 10). Yet, this Times article was not written by a male journalist hoping to undermine womens efforts to transfer gender norms. The author was in fact Mary Sargent Hopkins, a leading advocate for women's cycling and outdoor activities.

Mary Sargent Hopkins was a politically engaged, middle-class woman and an avid cyclist. She developed an extraordinary career by promoting womens exercise and sport in a variety of newspapers and magazines during the 1890s. It may seem counterintuitive that a nationally known, female sports columnist of the 1890s would use the popular press as a platform to disparage women athletes who challenged gender roles and evoke such conservatism. But Hopkins believed the majority of women bicyclists were not gender-bending radicals or "New Women," but respectable reformers working to improve women's lives within existing gender constructs.

Hopkins wrote in a period when women were by and large not taken seriously as journalists or medical authorities, yet readers widely regarded her as an expert in womens sports and exercise. Despite her popularity as a columnist, womens sports enthusiasts in both scholarly and popular circles have all but forgotten about Hopkins. No scholar of cycling or journalism has studied Hopkins in depth, and there has been no research exploring how she was able to gain such expert status. This paper speaks to this research gap. It investigates the specific conservative rhetorical strategy Hopkins used in her efforts as a columnist to promote exercise and sport for women, a project that required her to establish her ethos as an expert so readers would take her arguments seriously. This paper explores Hopkins' strategy as a...