For several years now, I’ve made a similar post to Facebook every Friday morning. I put up a photo of a woman riding a motorcycle and caption it “It’s FRIDAY and the streets are OURS!”
To my surprise, this weekly post gets a lot of love every time. To my even greater surprise, I get more positive responses from women than men. That may be because the photos I choose are not motorcycle cheesecake shots — you know, the kind of photos that show a lushly upholstered lady wearing nothing but a dental floss bikini and a provocative smile improbably draped over a heavily customized show bike. That is, shall we say, not my genre. The photos I post are of real women actually riding motorcycles, or at least those who look like they are about to: real women, real riders.
Recently, the publication I work for, ConsumersAdvocate.org, challenged me to publish a feature story about women who ride. It was a labor of love. I profiled three women riders who inspire me every time I ride.
Bessie Stringfield was an African American woman who rode all over the continental United States and several foreign countries back in the 1930s. She traveled alone through the Jim Crow south during a time when lynchings were disgustingly common. During World War II, she became a motorcycle courier for the US Army. When the war was over, she became a motorcycle performer, doing death-defying stunts at carnivals and fairs and participating in dirt track races. She later moved to Miami and founded a motorcycle club.
Lois Pryce is an English woman who’s ridden from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from London to Cape Town, and into every corner of Iran. She chronicles her travels in prose that is at times amusing, at times poignant, and always insightful. She, too, usually rides alone. I asked her about how she kept herself safe during her journeys, and she replied that her very vulnerability was her strength. Seeing a woman riding alone on a small motorcycle in a strange land makes people want to help and protect her. Not that she needs a lot of help — her strength, resourcefulness, good humor, and courage have carried her though some fairly terrifying situations.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson writes about riding motorcycles the way some people write about religious rituals: deeply, beautifully, movingly. She favors Ducatis, brawny Italian bikes known more for their power and style than their reliability. In lapidary prose, she profiles people who ride, showing them as the complex three-dimensional people they are. And she gets closer than any other writer to understanding the allure of motorcycles. The title of one of her books gets at this: The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles. Reading that book not only helped me understand motorcycles — it helped me understand myself.
The piece I wrote about these three riders became one of the most linked-to features out of the 450-some articles we’ve published. If you’d like to read the whole thing, please do. And send me your comments.
