Frances Willard and the Bicycle Named Gladys

July 30
19 mins

Episode Description

In 1893, Frances Willard, already one of the most famous women in America, took up a strange new machine called a bicycle and named it Gladys. Harmonia traces how Willard, president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, built a movement of nearly two hundred thousand women who learned to organize, speak, and lead in rooms styled to look like parlors, quietly trying their wings long before the wider world was ready to call it power.

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