How markets reshaped women’s lives.

With all that has been happening in the past decade or so regarding women, their rights, and progress, one regularly points out laws and political reform. Not that they don’t matter, but people often forget another far less glamorous yet potent force that has “quietly” reshaped women’s lives for the better—capitalism and a free society.

In a previous article, I explained how the washing machine, the creation of the birth control pill, and the rise of the service economy gave women the agency to better their lives. Here, I will continue in the same spirit, with a few other inventions that we don’t instinctively connect with women’s liberation.

To understand the story of the bicycle, we need to travel back to the late 19th century—a time when people’s mobility was restricted not by laws but by technology and wealth, or rather, by the lack of both. Travel required a horse, and a horse was neither cheap nor easy to maintain. For women, the barriers were even higher: social norms and safety in some cultures required a chaperone, making any trip more complicated and costly. The bicycle changed that, and in the words of the pioneering women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, this simple machine “has done more to emancipate women than any other thing in the world.”

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