The Bicycle Set Women Free. The Saddle Never Caught Up.

Illustration: cycling saddles weren't created for women, but BLUFEM was

In the 1890s, women started riding bicycles. A lot of them. They did it in long skirts and corsets, under social rules that made almost every movement harder.

Manufacturers tried to help. They lowered the frames. They bolted guards over the back wheel so skirts would not catch in the spokes. And some built bicycles with both pedals on the same side, so a woman could sit sideways and keep her skirt down, rather than rethink the skirt, or the saddle, or anything about how a woman actually sits on a bike.

It looked uncomfortable because it was. Women kept riding anyway.

The bicycle gave them something still rare at the time: the freedom to leave home and travel under their own power. That freedom made people nervous. Teachers were discouraged from cycling to work, doctors argued about whether riding damaged women's reproductive health, and women in practical cycling clothes were accused of turning society upside down.

Women were expected to adapt to the bicycle. Some of them started adapting the bicycle instead.

Women were not only riding. They were inventing.

During the 1890s boom, women filed patents on problems the industry had not bothered with. Kate Parke patented a bicycle lock in 1890, a spring-wound chain on a drum with an alarm bell. Sarah O. Clagett patented a bicycle-skirt fastener to stop a rider's skirt catching as she rode. And in 1897, Mary F. Henderson patented a bicycle saddle.

Henderson's design is the part that usually gets lost. It was not a padded seat. It was two soft cushions with a dip between them, so the weight sat on the sit bones and the pressure came off the middle. That is still the basic shape of most women's saddles today, and engineers were citing her design a hundred years later.

Meanwhile, the industry was solving a different problem

Henderson was thinking about where a body meets a saddle. The rest of the industry was thinking about the saddle.

Brooks was the most famous saddle maker of the era. Its patents from the 1890s read like suspension engineering: metal rods, brackets, springs, a screw to tighten the leather. Clever work, all of it aimed at making the saddle tougher, springier and easier to adjust.

Not a word about anatomy. Not women's, not men's, nobody's.

Anatomy did eventually reach saddle design. When it did, it arrived as one body.

From the 1930s onwards, saddle makers started carving out the middle: a hollow here, a groove there, an arrowhead-shaped cut-out by 1990. Decades of work on pressure between the legs, and none of it built around a female pelvis.

The machine was getting better far faster than anyone was studying the bodies riding it. And the body everyone had in mind was not a woman's.

A female engineer tried again

In 1991, mechanical engineer and bicycle designer Georgena Terry filed a patent titled, plainly, Bicycle Saddle for Women. In it she went through the existing designs one by one and spelled out why each of them failed female riders.

Her own answer was not a wider seat or more padding. She built the cushion from two materials with deliberately different properties: firmer where the pelvis needs support, softer at the pubic bone. The patent also dealt with sliding forward, stability, airflow, and the pressure created when a woman leans over the handlebars.

Start with the female body. Design the equipment around it.

Terry's work also exposed a problem we still have. A product can be sold as women-specific without being developed from any research on women. A shorter nose, a wider back or a central cut-out may help some riders. But sit-bone width, pelvic rotation, soft tissue and riding position vary enormously between women.

There is no single female body. There is no universal women's saddle.

Science finally started studying the pain

Women had been riding, and designing saddles, for a century before medicine took female cycling injuries seriously.

In 2002, a BMJ study described persistent, usually one-sided vulval swelling in competitive female cyclists, a condition that became known as bicyclist's vulva. It finally put a name to what repeated pressure, friction and blocked lymphatic drainage do to genital tissue.

Later work showed that saddle pressure depends on far more than padding. Saddle width, pelvic position, handlebar height and posture all change where your weight lands. And the popular central cut-out is not a fix in itself: research found cut-outs can raise average pressure on the perineum, with the worst readings along the rim of the hole.

A hole in the saddle is not the same as understanding female anatomy.

More than a century later, women are still absorbing it

A study published in February 2026 interviewed 20 competitive British female cyclists about saddle sores. Every one of them had experienced them. The authors acknowledge that women with saddle sores were probably more likely to volunteer, so this is not a prevalence rate, but what these riders describe is specific and consistent.

95% of them were already on saddles with a central cut-out or channel. 85% still had problems.

They described vulval pain, chafing, numbness, swelling, blisters, cysts, infections, antibiotics, surgical drainage. Three had permanent one-sided vulval swelling. One was told by her doctor that women do not get saddle problems but men do. The damage turned out to be permanent. Riders on sponsored teams reported being unable to switch away from a team saddle that was causing severe sores.

75% said they simply put up with the pain.

Finding a saddle that works was described as trial and error, long and expensive: buying, testing, reselling, paying for bike fits that produced no advice specific to women.

None of this means cycling harms women, or that every woman will suffer. It means that when pain does happen, women are still expected to handle it privately, at their own cost, instead of being handed equipment and advice built on evidence about their bodies.

And there is not much evidence to hand them. A review of the research on saddle sores found seventeen studies. Thirteen were about men. Two reported on women.

Women were there from the beginning. They rode in skirts, broke the rules, patented components and proposed better saddles.

Engineering and research are the ones running late.

Sources

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