Waching daily Oct 4 2018

Hi, my name's Indira Neville. I'm Principal Advisor for Services to Schools at the National Library.

I'm going to be talking about some of the research activities you might do for the curiosity card of the suffrage on a bike.

What you could do is you could get or make some long heavy skirts and get students to undertake a variety of physical activities in these:

riding a bike, but also climbing a tree, playing football, playing netball.

And then get them to do the same activities in their regular clothes and

record and explore what they noticed and felt etc about how they moved.

If you added into this, when they were wearing the skirts, the requirement to be delicate and slow

and modest and feminine, then you get another layer again

about how difficult it was to operate in these kinds of clothing.

You might like to explore the language associated with suffragettes and bikes.

They were known as 'velocipedestrians' and there was the phenomenon of the 'bicycle face',

where cycling was perceived to negatively impact a woman's beauty.

You might like to visit the Women's Suffrage Centenary Memorial in Te Ha o Hine Place in Auckland Central.

At the top of the stairs of this memorial is a panel of 4 cycling women,

and it's really interesting because their long skirts and big hats, which look so heavy, are bright colours

so, thinking about the contrast there.

You could explore the Unique Cycling Club of Chicago's 'list of don'ts' for women cyclists from 1895,

which includes: 'don't faint on the road', 'don't wear white kid gloves, wear silk',

'don't try to ride in your brother's clothes', and 'don't appear in public until you've learnt to ride well.'

Perhaps you could make your own list for 2018?

And finally, you could explore the extensive online historic and vintage sewing pattern collections,

to understand the history of bloomers and trousers for women and make some of the items.