prolog

Chapter 1: The Woman Goes
Chapter 2: Bicycles and New Women
Chapter 3: Take off your skirt and put on bloomers
Chapter 4: A Warm Welcome in France
Chapter 5: Amazing Adventures in Asia
Chapter 6 What did she ride?
Chapter 7: Hero or Conman?
Chapter 8: Annie Returns
Chapter 9: The Woman Who Caught the "Wild Man"

Epilogue
supplement

Annie Londonderry, the first woman to circumnavigate the world on a bicycle in the late 19th century!
Throw away your skirts and corsets and dream of absurd, cheerful, and lively liberation and success!

The late 19th century in America was an era of world travel, bicycles, and the "new woman."
Countless adventurers and braggarts have attempted or pretended to attempt circumnavigation of the globe, and the public has been enthralled by their real-life or made-up stories.
Bicycles, which had just begun to become popular, gave people unprecedented speed and freedom of movement.
Bicycle fever spread like wildfire, regardless of age, class, or gender.
A new idea began to emerge that women should have equal social rights as men.
'New women' armed with modern fashion and confidence emerged, and the women's suffrage movement began in earnest.


Coincidentally, around this time, two wealthy Boston merchants (men, of course) placed a whopping $10,000 bet on whether a woman could circumnavigate the world on a bicycle.
The person chosen to decide the winner of the bet was twenty-four-year-old Annie Londonderry, who would later become known as the first woman to cycle around the world.
On June 25, 1894, Annie, accompanied by hundreds of supporters and onlookers, embarked on a great adventure, the likes of which no woman had ever attempted.
She had to travel around the world in 15 months, starting with nothing and returning with $5,000 more after expenses.


Naturally, Annie's adventures became a hot topic for feminists of the time, and indeed for all women.
Will she be able to break into a male-dominated field and prove that women possess equal capabilities? Furthermore, Annie boldly challenged and unabashedly subverted the conservative norms of Victorian femininity.
At a time when it was unthinkable for women to wear trousers, she threw off her skirt and corset and rode a men's bicycle in men's cycling attire.
It would have been shocking to most of his contemporaries.


Annie turned herself into a billboard to earn $5,000 to cover travel expenses and wager requirements.
All kinds of advertisements were attached to the bicycle frame, wheels, and riding clothes.
To the cities she would arrive in, she sent a telegram saying, “Miss Londonderry, on her bicycle tour around the world, will be arriving soon,” to create a welcoming atmosphere in advance, and upon arrival, she sold autographed photos and souvenirs and gave lectures about her bicycle journey to earn money.
She was admired and admired in every city and town she passed through, as a true adventurer and a woman ahead of her time.
A large number of riders came from far away to welcome her and rode alongside her for tens of kilometers.


According to Annie's lectures and press interviews, she was enthusiastically welcomed in France, traveled across Turkey to Jerusalem, crossed India, risked her life on the battlefield during the Sino-Japanese War in China, and visited Siberia and Korea.
He encountered highway robbers, was seriously injured when run over by a fugitive's wagon, crossed a barren desert on a broken bicycle, and was captured by the Japanese and nearly killed.
She was a medical student at Harvard, the nephew of a senator, the owner of a major media company, hunted tigers with German royalty, and had hundreds of men propose to her.


However, Peter Zutlin, author of Annie Londonderry's Intrepid Bicycle Journey Around the World, 1894, reconstructed the true course of Annie's journey by digging up and comparing newspaper articles from the cities she passed through or claimed to have passed through.
As a result, while it is true that Annie traveled around the world using some form of transportation, surprisingly, only a small part of her story was true.
Annie was a cheeky woman with a natural gift for eloquence and acting skills that rivaled those of an actress, captivating audiences with her brazenly embellished and exaggerated stories.


Annie boldly planned her own bicycle trip around the world to escape grinding poverty, make a fortune, and achieve freedom from the stifling oppression of women, and she brilliantly used the media and fame to make her trip a “success.”
And thus, a “legend” was born, establishing itself as a female cyclist hero and symbol of the new woman in the late 19th century.