Frances E. Willard (1839 -1898) learned to ride the bicycle at the ripe old age of 53.

Willard took to the bicycle as she crusaded for gaining women the right to vote, at the time she was logging 30,000 miles and 400 speaking engagements a year for the cause. During the momentum towards the 1920 declaration that gave women the right to vote, Willard slowly learned to ride the bicycle, but it quickly became a symbolic freedom vehicle, an instrument for social change.

In her 1895 book A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, Willard writes, “That which made me succeed with the bicycle was precisely what had gained me a measure of success in life — it was the hardihood of spirit that led me to begin, the persistence of will that held me to my task, and the patience that was willing to begin again when the last stroke had failed. And so I found high moral uses in the bicycle and can commend it as a teacher without pulpit or creed.”

Willard uses the bicycle as a way to open dialogue on unhealthy gender traditions. The corset was used to squeeze women’s bodies into an hourglass shape, a popular style for during Willard’s time. The clothing was painful and unhealthy, as Willard writes "A woman with bands hanging on her hips, and dress snug about the waist and chokingly tight at the throat, with heavy trimmed skirts dragging down the back and numerous folds heating the lower part of the spine, and with tight shoes, ought to be in agony.” Willard then offers the bicycle as a method to negotiate a release from the tradition. “If women ride they must, when riding, dress more rationally than they have been [expected] to do. If they do this many prejudices will melt away. Reason will gain upon precedent and ere long the comfortable, sensible, and artistic wardrobe of the rider will make the conventional style of women's dress absurd to the eye and un-durable to the understanding." By the end of the 1920's, the corset had all but disappeared from the closet of America.

Two Wheeled Foundation shares Willard’s regard for the bicycle, and its noble ability to act as a catalyst for advancing a social movement. As TWF moves forward with its activities, it will hold close Willard’s strategy for riding the cycle of social change “Two things must occupy your thinking powers to the exclusion of every other thing: first, the goal; and, second, the momentum requisite to reach it. Do not look down like an imbecile…look up and off and on and out; get forehead and foot into line, the latter acting as a rhythmic spur in the flanks of your equilibriated equine; so shall you win, and that right speedily.”