Celebrations around the U.S. are honoring the people who helped give women the right to vote via the 19th Amendment. (See this week’s cover story for more about Tennessee’s role as the 36th and final state to ratify the amendment.) Meanwhile, Nashville’s Lane Motor Museum is shining a light on the ways in which women’s perspectives helped shape advancements in transportation with Opportunity and the Open Road: Women’s Suffrage and Mobility. The exhibit offers a close-up look at vehicles like the “safety bicycle” of the late 19th century (represented by a 1935 Hirondelle Rétro-Directe bike from the Lane collection). It’s got two wheels of equal size — as opposed to the pennyfarthing with its giant front wheel — and we just know it as “a bicycle.” The bike precipitated a turn away from restrictive Victorian fashion via the Rational Dress Movement; also, its relatively low cost made it easy for women to be mobile and to organize as the suffrage movement took off. Another highlight of the exhibit is a 1918 Ford Model T — inexpensive and easy to repair, the Model T was marketed heavily to women and widely used by suffragettes. See the whole exhibit on display through May 31. The museum is open with restrictions to keep visitors safe during the pandemic — see lanemotormuseum.org for complete details. Since tours of the vault (where many more cars that can’t fit on the main floor are kept) are very limited, be sure to check out A Hobby Gone Wild, the long-awaited, photo-heavy book about the collection. STEPHEN TRAGESER
See Opportunity and the Open Road at Lane Motor Museum
