Question

Read the excerpt from Chapter 5 of Wheels of Change.

Some stated the liberating effects of the bicycle with less sarcasm. "The bicycle has brought to women a healthful, wholesome means of securing a degree of freedom and independence that no amount of discussion regarding 'women's rights' would ever have produced," wrote the L.A.W. Bulletin and Good Roads magazine in 1898. Meanwhile, Munseg's Magazine assessed the impact of the wheel on women in a special bicycle-themed issue. "If she has ridden her bicycle into new fields, becoming in the process a new creature, it has been gradually and unconsciously," the editors wrote. "She did not have to be born again in some mysterious fashion, becoming a strange creature, a new woman. She is more like the 'eternal feminine,' who has taken on wings, and who is using them with an ever increasing delight in her new power." Indeed, many bicycle companies at home and abroad did put wings on the women in their advertisements, emphasizing that they had taken flight.

Sue Macy’s synthesis connects the idea that the bicycle changed the way many people viewed women by

reflecting on the discussion and fight for women’s rights that had already been taking place.
explaining that using women in advertisements directly led to an increase in bicycle sales.
providing examples of the ways women were being portrayed in magazines and advertisements.

Answer 1

providing examples of the ways women were being portrayed in magazines and advertisements.

The excerpt quotes periodicals and notes advertisers putting "wings" on women, illustrating how the bicycle reshaped public images of women rather than arguing it grew out of the suffrage movement or that ads directly increased sales.