Lillias Campbell Davidson (1853 – 1 March 1934) was an American-born British writer. She founded the Lady Cyclists' Association. In 2018, the New York Times published a belated obituary as part of its Overlooked series.
Life Lillias Campbell Davidson was born in Brooklyn in 1853.
Davidson started cycling in her later 20s, in the early 1880s, often in the early morning when streets were quiet to avoid social stigma. She once turned down a side street to avoid the local vicar seeing her cycling. She soon became more vocal, and encouraged other women to join her, writing women's columns for the Scottish Cyclist and the Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette. In 1892, she founded the Lady Cyclists’ Association, and acted as its president for the next five years. She published her “Handbook for Lady Cyclists” in 1896 and encouraged women to wear more practical rational dress to make physical activity easier.
According to Elizabeth Robins Pennell, another American cyclist in London at the same time, Davidson was employed by Bicycling News and the Cyclists' Touring Club Gazette.
She lived for a time with Alice Werner, a teacher of Bantu, and Ménie Muriel Dowie, a British writer of the New Woman school. According to the New York Times: Davidson published 14 novels and many articles. She moved to Southsea and died on 1 March 1934.
Works Non-fiction Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad, Iliffe & Son: London, 1889. ; London: Elliott and Thompson, 2011. , Handbook for Lady Cyclists, Hay Nisbett & Co, c.1896 Catherine of Bragança: Infanta of Portugal and Queen-Consort of England, J Murray, 1908; (Classic Reprint), Forgotten Books, 2016
Fiction Houses of Clay, S W Partridge, 19-- Second Lieutenant Celia, Bliss Sands, 1898 For Lack of Love, Horace Marshall & Son, 1900 The Theft of a Heart, C Arthur Pearson, 1902 The Confessions of a Matchmaking Mother, J F Taylor, 1902. Purple and Fine Linen, Ward, Lock & Co, 1916 A Girl's Battle ... With six illustrations. London, 1933.
Serialised The Twentieth of June, 1887 The Young Man from Chicago, 1900 Thief and Heiress, 1911 The Touchstone, 1912 The Marriage Trap: The Story of a Woman's Sin and a Young Man's Folly, 1912
Footnotes
Further reading Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations From the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 2003). See chapter "Women and the Bicycle".