Susan B. Anthony, the American suffragist, said in 1896 that the bicycle had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." That sentence sounds rhetorical until you read what came right before it: she'd just watched a young woman cycle past her on the street, alone, going somewhere she'd decided to go without asking permission. To anyone watching in 1896, that was a small revolution.
What the safety bicycle did
The safety bicycle — the chain-driven, two-equal-wheels design that arrived around 1885 — was the first form of personal mobility that didn't require a horse, a carriage, a driver, or a chaperone. It was cheap enough that working-class households could buy one. It was easy enough that anyone could learn to ride it in an afternoon. And — most importantly — it was independent. You decided when to leave, where to go, and when to come back.
That independence had unintended cascading consequences. Within a decade of the safety bicycle's mass adoption in Europe and the US:
- Women's clothing reformed. The hoop skirts and corsets that had defined late-Victorian women's dress were physically impossible to ride in. By 1896, "bicycle bloomers" — divided skirts — were widely worn. By 1905 the corset was on the way out.
- Courtship rituals shifted. The idea that a young woman could go for a ride with a young man without a third party present was, in 1890, scandalous. By 1900 it was the new normal.
- Geographic horizons widened. Working-class women in particular gained the ability to commute to jobs across town, visit relatives in the next village, attend meetings of the new women's suffrage movement.
None of this was the bicycle's intention. It just happened to be the first piece of personal mobility that didn't require permission to use.
The arc to micromobility
The reason this history is worth remembering today is that micromobility — shared bikes, e-bikes, scooters — is, on a smaller scale, doing the same thing. The people for whom micromobility makes the biggest difference are not the people who already owned a car. They're the people who didn't have a way to make a six-kilometre trip in 15 minutes before.
In the cities we operate in, we see this in the data. The single biggest demographic shift in our user base over 2024 was women aged 25–40 picking up the application as their primary transport mode for school runs, evening commutes, and weekend errands. The reason they give in our surveys is the same reason the 1890s women gave: it's independent. You decide when to leave and where to go.
What's still ahead
One thing the 1890s didn't have was data. The bicycle empowered women in the late 19th century but it left almost no trace behind it — we know what happened only because newspapers and suffragists wrote about it. Micromobility is the opposite. Every shared-bike trip is logged. The downside of that is privacy, which we treat seriously. The upside is that for the first time, we can actually measure how much access a city's mobility infrastructure provides to different groups, and improve the worst-served corridors deliberately.
The 1890s bicycle revolution was accidental. The 2026 micromobility revolution is intentional. That's a real difference, and a real opportunity.