The WomanTours trailer fleet carries bicycles, luggage, repair supplies and snacks that help make our tours run smoothly. Without them our guides would be empty-handed. Just as with our vans, our four trailers --- Fannie, Kittie, Sally and Harriet --- have been named after famous historical women that we admire. (Check out the blog about our van names here.)
We’re celebrating Women’s History Month by paying homage to these great women as well as the trailers that bear their names.
Fannie
Our West Coast kitchen trailer Fannie is named for civil and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer was the youngest of 20 children in a sharecropper family in rural Mississippi. Though her activism began nearly a century after the end of slavery, she faced many of the same indignities in her quest for equality: threats, beatings, shootings, harassment and coercive arrests.
In 1962, Hamer led a group of 17 Black peers to register to vote in 1962. Failing a literacy test, they were denied registration. Police stopped the group on their way home and fined them $100 because the bus they were riding in was too yellow. Hamer’s multiple attempts to register also let to being fired by the plantation owner she and her husband worked for and getting shot at by Klu Klux Klan members.
In 1964 Hamer helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, whose mission was to challenge the state’s whites-only delegation at the Democrat Convention. While her bid for Congress that same year never made it past the Democratic primaries, her powerful oratory skills brought the cause to national attention. In 1971 she was part of the feminist coalition that organized the National Women’s Political Caucus, whose mission is to train, support and women in their pursuit of elected and appointed offices at all levels of government.
Toward the end of her life, Hamer focused on creating economic opportunities for Black families, from launching a “pig bank” that gave farmers free animals for breeding, to starting a farming cooperative and getting low-income housing built in Mississippi. She died of breast cancer in 1977 at the age of 59.
In the last days of his presidency, Joe Biden posthumously awarded Hamer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Kittie
Our East Coast kitchen trailer is named for Kittie Knox, a Boston bicycle racer whose athletic feats and fashion spunk challenged racial and gender barriers in the cycling community of the 1890s.
Born to a Black father who died when she was 7 and a White mother, Knox began working as a seamstress to help support her family. The wages also helped her buy a bicycle, which she rode as a member of the Riverside Cycling Cub, Boston’s first all-Black biking club. A strong cyclist who led the pack in many races and events, she was admitted to the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) that same year, 1893.
The following year, the League instigated a new rule that only whites could join. When Knox arrived at a high-profile LAW meet in Asbury Park, NJ in 1895 with her LAW membership card, she was refused an entrance badge. Many rallied for her admission, and Knox did manage to participate in several events. A LAW publication that came out a month later decreed that the color bar could not be applied retroactively, and Knox was officially welcomed as LAW’s first Black member.
Knox also defied fashion convention, showing up at cycling events in knickerbocker suits rather than long skirts. Perhaps even more than her athleticism, her wardrobe and appearance garnered much media attention.
Knox was only 26 when she died of kidney disease in 1900. MassBike hosts an annual ride named after Knox, and Cambridge has a bike path named in her honor.
Sally
Our West Coast e-bike trailer is named for astronaut and physicist Sally Ride, who was the first American woman to travel in space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983.
The Southern California native initially set her sights on a tennis career, but pivoted to physics, earning bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees at Stanford University. Responding to a student newspaper job ad in 1978, she was one of only five women selected for National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s search for “mission specialists” for future flights.
Ride took part in another space mission in 1984 and helped with the investigation of the 1986 Challenger disaster. She retired from NASA in 1987 and went on to direct the California Space Science Institute at University of California San Diego, where she also taught physics.
Ride’s personal life was largely kept private. It wasn’t until after her death from pancreatic cancer in 2012 at the age of 61 that former women’s tennis pro, writer and psychology professor Tam O’Shaughnessy went public about their 27-year relationship. The two helped launch Sally Ride Science, a non-profit entity that coaxed young people, especially girls, to study science and technology. The couple also co-wrote several books about space science for children. O’Shaughnessy posthumously accepted Ride’s Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Harriet
Our East Coast e-bike trailer is named for abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who bravely led 70 enslaved people to freedom in the north over the course of 19 dangerous journeys. Tubman traveled mostly at night, using the stars to guide her.
When she was 13, Tubman refused to help an enslaver trap someone who was trying to escape. The enslaver threw a weight at the runaway but missed, cracking Tubman’s skull instead. This led to a lifetime of chronic headaches and seizures. During these “sleeping spells,” Tubman experienced prophetic dreams and visions of God, which prompted her to devote her life to becoming the "Moses" of her people.
Her first foray to the north was in 1849, arriving in Philadelphia where she connected with a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. She returned South again and again to lead family members and others to the North. Pennsylvania was her first destination, but when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 mandated that captured enslaved people be returned to their enslavers, Tubman set her sights on Canada.
Tubman also helped abolitionist John Brown organize the 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. During the Civil War, Tubman worked as a Union Army nurse and cook, then as a spy and scout. In 1863 she famously took part in an attack on South Carolina plantations, which liberated 750 enslaved people. Many of them joined the Union fight.
When the war was over, Tubman settled in Auburn, NY, devoting her energies to caring for her elderly parents and helped build an African-American eldercare home. She also married, adopted a daughter and became deeply involved in the women’s suffrage campaign, working alongside the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Tubman died of pneumonia in 1913. She was 91. Her Auburn homestead is now a National Historic Park.
