Frances E Willard

A Wheel Within a Wheel Frances E Willard

A remarkable book written by the educator, temperance reformer and women's suffragist, Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839-1898). Basing on her own experience in learning to ride the bicycle, Willard here delivers a veritable theory of life, constantly linking the learning process of bicycling with life itself, finding correspondences between the technique of riding a bicycle and that of living. For Willard, they both are the same: both requiring courage, balance, persistence, and, in the end, both bringing rewarding results and satisfaction if carried on properly. While chronicling her experience with learning how to ride, she also "found a whole philosophy of life in the wooing and winning of my bicycle" (p. 25) Through reading Willard's volume on life and on bicycle riding, the modern reader can better relate to how the bicycle was connected to, and a symbol of, women's rights and suffragism.