The women who rode first: motorcycling's pioneers

CultureVan BurenBessie Stringfield

From Clara Wagner, disqualified in 1910 despite a perfect score card, to Beryl Swain, stripped of her licence after the 1962 Tourist Trophy, one and the same story links the women who rode when the rules shut them out. The Van Buren sisters crossed 1916 America on their Indian Power Plus machines, Beatrice Shilling moved from the Brooklands banking to the carburettors of the Rolls-Royce Merlin, Theresa Wallach rode London to Cape Town, Bessie Stringfield criss-crossed the segregated South and Anke-Eve Goldmann imposed her one-piece leather suit.

---

Before 1920: riding when the road does not exist

At the turn of the 1900s, the motorcycle was not a leisure object but a utilitarian and temperamental machine, repaired by its owner at the side of tracks that were often barely roads. The first women to take one up were not campaigning first of all: they rode, because the machine existed and went further than a horse. The obstacle did not come from the mechanics but from the sporting regulations which, almost everywhere, treated the woman rider as an anomaly.

The American Clara Wagner (1891-1961) experienced it very early. The daughter of a manufacturer, she joined the Federation of American Motorcyclists in 1907, aged fifteen, and became its first female member. In 1910, at eighteen, she completed a 365-mile endurance event between Chicago and Indianapolis in the rain, on broken roads, and handed in a perfect score card. The federation nevertheless refused her the trophy : her entry was reclassified as « unofficial », on the grounds that the rules excluded women from competition.

Five years later, Effie Hotchkiss, twenty-six, left Brooklyn on 2 May 1915 on a three-speed Harley-Davidson Model 11-F, her fifty-six-year-old mother Avis installed in the sidecar. Destination: San Francisco and its world's fair. They became the first women to cross the United States by motorcycle, then rode home again: around 9,000 miles in all, tools in the pannier.

---

1916: the Van Buren sisters cross America

Augusta, born in 1884, and Adeline Van Buren, born in 1889, are held to be descendants of Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States — a lineage constantly repeated since 1916, but which no genealogical source has ever established. They campaigned within the Preparedness Movement, which called for the country to get ready to enter the First World War. Their idea was precise: give women the dispatch-rider duties, so as to free men for the front. To prove the point, they decided to cross the continent, each on her own machine.

On 4 July 1916, they left the Sheepshead Bay track in Brooklyn on two 1,000 cc Indian Power Plus machines. They reached Los Angeles on 8 September after around 5,500 miles, close to 8,850 kilometres, then pushed on to Tijuana. On the way, they climbed to the summit of Pikes Peak, above 4,300 metres: the first women to get there by motor vehicle, on the mountain that the Colorado hillclimb would go on to make legendary. Their Power Plus, then brand new from the Springfield manufacturer, took the dirt, the mud and the desert.

What followed is less glorious. The American army refused to enlist them, and any other woman, as dispatch riders. Part of the press reproached them for deserting their homes: in August 1916, the Denver Post insinuated that military preparedness mainly served as a pretext for getting away from the house, and mocked their leather and khaki outfits. The specialist press, for its part, congratulated the motorcycle and described the trip as a holiday. During the journey, the two sisters were arrested several times, not for speeding but for wearing men's clothing. Augusta would become an aircraft pilot, Adeline a lawyer.

---

Brooklands: three women, one Gold Star

In England, the Brooklands banking awarded a coveted distinction: the Gold Star of the British Motorcycle Racing Club, given to anyone completing a lap at over 100 mph, that is 161 km/h, during a race. Only three women earned it before the war closed the circuit.

The first was Florence Blenkiron (1904-1991), on 14 April 1934, on a Grindlay-Peerless 500, at 102.06 mph. Beatrice Shilling followed on 24 August of the same year on her Norton M30; the published speeds vary from one source to another, between 101 and 106 mph, but the crossing of the 100 mph mark is itself not disputed. Theresa Wallach completed the trio in the spring of 1939 on a Norton 350: her Gold Star is one of the last awarded by the club before the banking closed for good.

The detail matters: at Brooklands, women raced against men, in the same events and on the same machines. That de facto parity was an exception in the sporting landscape of the time. Blenkiron and Wallach would in fact set off together for the Sahara a few months after the first of these Gold Stars.

---

Beatrice Shilling: from the speed bowl to the Merlin engine

Beatrice Shilling, born on 8 March 1909 at Waterlooville, took an engineering degree at the University of Manchester in 1932, then a master's in mechanical engineering. She raced at Brooklands while preparing her own engines. Recruited in 1936 to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, she took charge of carburettor research on 1 November 1939.

Her name remains attached to a very concrete problem. Hurricanes and Spitfires fitted with the Rolls-Royce Merlin saw their engines cut out in a dive: under negative g, the carburettor disrupted fuel delivery, while the German fighters with direct injection knew no such fault. Shilling devised a part of disarming simplicity, a drilled thimble, soon simplified into a calibrated washer limiting the fuel flow. In early 1941, she toured Royal Air Force fighter stations at the head of a small team to fit it; the tour was complete by March.

The pilots nicknamed it « Miss Shilling's orifice ». She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1949, stayed at Farnborough until she retired in 1969 and died on 18 November 1990. Her path says the essential: the circuit was not entertainment separate from her profession, it was its laboratory.

---

Theresa Wallach: London to Cape Town, then America

Theresa Wallach (30 April 1909 - 30 April 1999) was a mechanic before she was an adventurer. On 11 December 1934, she left London with Florence Blenkiron on a single-cylinder Panther 600 with a sidecar and a trailer, named Venture. The two women reached Cape Town on 29 July 1935, having crossed Europe and then the Sahara, without a compass by their own account. Viscountess Astor and several other British women MPs had come to see them off.

The distances quoted vary greatly from one source to another, from a few thousand miles to 13,500: the exact figure remains uncertain, the duration does not — a little over seven months. During the war, Wallach served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a dispatch rider and became, in 1942, the first woman tank mechanic in that corps.

In 1947, she set off alone: two and a half years and more than 32,000 miles across Canada, the United States and Mexico, funded by odd jobs strung together along the way. She then settled in the United States, opened a British motorcycle dealership in Chicago, then founded a riding school in Phoenix, Arizona, called the Easy Riding Academy. She published a riding manual in 1970 and would ride until she was eighty-eight.

---

Bessie Stringfield: the queen of Miami, and what we know of her

Bessie Stringfield was born at Edenton, North Carolina, on 5 March 1911 — American social security records give March 1912, and the date remains disputed. As a teenager she learned to ride and never stopped, inventing a method of travel that became famous: she tossed a coin onto a map of the United States and rode to wherever it landed. She called these her « penny tours ».

A Black woman alone on the roads of the segregated South in the 1930s and 1940s, she regularly slept on her motorcycle for want of an establishment that would take her. She was deliberately rammed by the white driver of a pick-up truck, was denied prizes she had won in flat track after racing in male guise, and had to demonstrate her riding before a Miami police captain to stop being pulled over. During the Second World War she was a civilian courier for the American army for four years, on her own 61 cubic inch Harley-Davidson, and crossed the country eight times ferrying documents between bases.

Settled in Miami, she founded the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club there in the 1950s and inherited the nickname the local press gave her. She died at Opa-locka on 16 February 1993. Part of her biography is disputed today : her niece Esther Bennett told the New York Times in 2018 that Stringfield had embellished her origins, and her biographer Ann Ferrar has acknowledged relaying those accounts at her request. None of that takes a single mile off what she rode; a pioneer does not need to be a myth in order to count. The American Motorcyclist Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2002.

---

Anke-Eve Goldmann: the one-piece leathers and the closed door

Born in Berlin on 27 November 1929, Anke-Eve Goldmann was a language teacher and journalist before she was a racer. She rode first a BMW R67/3 from 1953, then one of the very first examples of the R69, before moving to an MV Agusta. She became an unofficial ambassador for the flat twins of the Bavarian firm, whose touring character she defended in the specialist press.

She is credited with a first in riding kit: the one-piece women's leather suit, designed with the German outfitter Harro, with its diagonal chest zip and its close-fitting cut. Until then, people raced in separate jacket and trousers. A few years earlier, among the men, Geoff Duke had imposed the same principle in Grand Prix racing. Goldmann's version would later go on sale commercially.

From the 1950s she raced in endurance and on circuits, at the Nürburgring and at Hockenheim, but the upper levels stayed closed to her on the sole grounds that she was a woman. In 1958 she took part in founding the European branch of the Women's International Motorcycle Association, of which she became press officer, and wrote articles in Das Motorrad, Moto Revue and Cycle World. André Pieyre de Mandiargues drew on her for Rebecca, the heroine of The Motorcycle (1963). She withdrew from public life in the mid-1970s.

---

The ban: from Clara Wagner to Beryl Swain

The thread linking these paths is not courage, it is the rulebook. Clara Wagner was demoted in 1910 because a woman could not appear in the results ; the Van Burens were turned away by the army in 1916; Goldmann was blocked on the threshold of the top level in the 1950s. Each time, the argument advanced was protection.

The best documented case is that of Beryl Swain (1936-2007). In 1962, she started the 50 cc Tourist Trophy race on an Itom and finished twenty-second, at an average of 48.3 mph, her gearbox having lost its top gear on the second lap. She was the first woman to finish a solo race on the Mountain Course of the Isle of Man classic. The Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme had imposed a minimum weight before the event of 9 stone 6 pounds, around 60 kg; Swain weighed under 8 and had been allowed to take the weigh-in wearing a diving belt. The following year, her international licence was withdrawn and women were barred from the TT. No woman would take the start again before Hilary Musson, in 1978.

When competition closes, there is still the show. Funfairs, for their part, employed top-level women riders : in 1938, the Englishwoman Marjorie Dare rode no-handed on the wall of death at the Southend Kursaal. The paradox is complete: judged too fragile for a closed circuit, a woman could ride vertically in front of a paying audience.

🏁 These silhouettes of leather and chrome deserve better than a footnote: find them again in our motorcycle posters and prints and give your garage the memory it deserves.

---

Summary table

---

FAQ — Frequently asked questions

• Who were the first women to cross the United States by motorcycle?
  Effie Hotchkiss and her mother Avis, in 1915, on a Harley-Davidson with a sidecar. The Van Buren sisters, in 1916, were the first to make the crossing each on her own machine.
• Did the Van Buren sisters get what they wanted?
  No. Despite a crossing of around 5,500 miles completed on 8 September 1916, the American army refused to employ women as dispatch riders.
• Did Bessie Stringfield really serve during the Second World War?
  Yes, as a civilian courier for the American army for four years, on her own Harley-Davidson. Several elements of her personal biography are, however, disputed today by her family.
• What is the Brooklands Gold Star?
  A distinction of the British Motorcycle Racing Club rewarding a lap completed at over 100 mph in a race. Three women earned it: Florence Blenkiron and Beatrice Shilling in 1934, Theresa Wallach in 1939.
• Why did women disappear from the Tourist Trophy after 1962?
  The Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme, which had already imposed a minimum weight before the race, withdrew Beryl Swain's international licence the following year, on the grounds that the discipline was too dangerous for women. No woman raced the TT before Hilary Musson, in 1978.
• Was Beatrice Shilling a racer or an engineer?
  Both. She raced at Brooklands and led carburettor research at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, where she designed the device that corrected the Rolls-Royce Merlin's fuel delivery under negative g.

↑ Back to top