Marlene Wagman-Geller

Jun 27, 2025 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“I didn’t want to spend my life at home with a baby under my apron every year.”

The British film, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, set in 1910, revolved around the early days of aviation. When Lord Rawnsley forbid his suffragette daughter to pilot a plane, her fiancé conceived the idea of an air race from London to Paris. In a similar vein, American Annie Cohen Kopchovsky-a magnificent woman in her variation of a flying machine- set out to become the first woman to traverse the globe on a bicycle. As Annie Londonderry and astounded the world with her derring-do.

In 1884, Samuel Clemens, known by pen name Mark Tawin, took his first bicycle ride at age eighty-eight. The author recalled mounting the penny-farthing bike and immediately flew over the handlebars and landed in the hospital. In “Taming the Bicycle,” he encouraged readers to buy a two-wheeler, and ended his essay, “You will not regret it, if you live.” The author’s words proved prescient for Annie Kopchovsky who survived and never regretted her ride to remember.

In the episode from Seinfeld, “The Understudy, Bette Midler belted out, “Well you’ve come a long way from Milan to Minsk, Rochelle Rochelle.” Another woman who made a long journey, in more ways than one, was Annie Cohen, born in a village near Riga, Latvia, (then part of the Russian empire) to Jewish parents, Levi and Beatrice, (Leib and Basha before anglicizing their names). Due to Tsar Alexander II’s virulent anti-Semitism, the Cohens and their children Sarah, Bennett, and Annie, in 1875 immigrated to the United States. Although not subjected to the Cossacks pursuing them in pogroms, life was hard for the Cohens in their adopted city of Boston, Massachusetts. The family lived in Spring Street, in the West End-that could have been called the Dead End. Their overcrowded tenement building forced its residents to become unwilling eavesdroppers on one another’s lives. In addition to their poverty and language barrier, they had landed in a city that was anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic. The first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis, wrote, “anti-Semitism seems to have reached its American pinnacle.” The Wasp elite ruled, as illustrated in the New England ditty, “And this is good old Boston/The home of the bean and the cod/Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots/ And the Cabots speak only to God.” The Cohens’ environs consisted of horses pulling peddler’s carts, boys in caps and knickerbockers hawking newspapers, and Orthodox Jews walking to synagogue.

To add to her less than auspicious circumstances, in 1887, when Annie was seventeen, Levi passed away, followed by Beatrice’s death two months later. As her older sister, Sarah, had married and moved to Maine, Annie and Bennett were responsible for their siblings, ten-year-old Jacob, and eight-year-old, Rosa. The passing of her parents spared them the grief of Jacob’s death at age eighteen from pneumonia. The following year, in an arranged marriage, eighteen-year-old Annie wed a fellow Eastern European in their neighborhood, the Orthodox Jewish Simon “Max” Kopchovsky who peddled second-hand clothing and household items. As Max spent more time attending synagogue and studying the Torah than earning a living, money was in short supply. Adding to their penury was what historians refer to as the Other Great Depression, also known as the Panic of 1893. Although the mores of the era dictated married women did not hold jobs, through Bennett, employed by the Boston Evening Transcript, Annie found a three-day a week position selling advertising space for local newspapers. Unable to afford their own home, the Kopchovshys shared their miniscule, third-floor apartment with Annie’s siblings, Bennett, his wife, Bertha, (Baila), and their two children. Within four years, there was even less space with the birth of Max’s and Annie’s children: Bertha Malkie, (Mollie), born nine months after her parents’ wedding, followed by Libbie, and Simon. While Jewish tradition dictates that a child be christened after a deceased relative, Annie chose the name Libby after President’s Cleveland’s sister, nicknamed Libby, who served as the First Lady for her bachelor brother.

The name Annie Cohen Kopchovsky would have dissolved into anonymity if not for a craze that swept the nation. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw a bike boom born from the creation of the safety bicycle that had identical sized wheels, a vast improvement from the earlier models that had a huge front wheel and tiny back one. Upgrades transformed the domain for the brave of heart into a hobby within the realm of Everyman. As part of the trend, brother Wilbur and Orville Wright owned a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, where they also experimented in inventing a flying machine. Piggybacking on the popularity, there were weddings on wheels, even a christening where baby and nurse arrived on a tandem. Men took to cycling to work, but the greatest sociological impact of the bicycle was its impact on women that freed them from a housebound existence. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony was a huge proponent of the trend that cut the apron springs. In an interview for The New York World, Susan told journalist Nellie Bly, “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent.”

In her tenement, weighed down with caring for two toddlers a job, and life on a shoestring budget, Annie viewed the bicycle as a flying carpet. Lore holds that a group of Boston’s businessmen were at the Algonquin Club in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood, an exclusive establishment that had a “No Jews, No Women allowed” policy. The conversation turned to Thomas Stevens who had left San Francisco in 1884 and returned three years later, the first person to have travelled around the world on a bicycle. Club member Colonel Albert Pope, the owner of the Pope Manufacturing Company, maker of the Columbia bicycle, made a wager: he bet $10,000 that a woman could accomplish the same feat. John Dowe, who had made his fortune in the sugar trade, took the bait. Pope’s rationale was-win or lose, (and he believed he would lose), he could capitalize on the contest in much the same way as Joseph Pulitzer had done with reporter Nellie Bly who traveled the world in less than eighty days, thereby beating the fictional Frenchman, Phileas Fogg. The candidate had to circle the cycle the globe in a fifteen-month time span, and raise $15,00 along the way through promotions, ($135,000 in contemporary currency). If she succeeded, she would pedal away with her earnings and $10.000 in prize money. Now all Pope had to do was find the woman intrepid enough-crazy enough-to undertake the challenge.

Another roadblock for a perspective candidate were those who viewed female cyclists as anathema. Protestors waylaid lady riders and pelted them with bricks, eggs, and rotten vegetables. Opponents claimed a result of riding a bike was infertility, manly mannerisms, and promiscuity, (the latter due to leather seats that vibrated with motion). Puck Magazine depicted a harridan riding with a man half her size perched on her handlebars, illustrating the trend also led to emasculation. 

Annie picked up the gauntlet: for the lure of lucre, contribution to the feminist cause, for a grand adventure. Her first order of business was to learn to ride, “Two lessons sufficed for the learning and then I announced my readiness to start.” As for self-promotion, she was not concerned: she had sold ad space during a crippling Depression. She also had to break the news to Max. Although he was understandably upset, as Annie wore the pants, (later bloomers), he concurred. What assuaged Annie’s guilt at leaving her children was she knew her sister-in-law would be a wonderful surrogate mother who would love Molly, Libbie, and Simon as much as she did her own two children. Annie also had to come up with a pseudonym. While she decided to keep her given name, (after all, it worked for the Old West’s sharp-shooter,) Cohen was Jewish, and Kopchovsky foreign-both of which would against her. As the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire had offered her $100.00 to display its name on a placard on her bike as a travelling billboard, (the first of many promotional schemes), Annie Cohen Kopchovsky transformed to Mlle. Annie Londonderry. The photograph of Annie advertising the water company is likely the first image of a female athlete hawking a product.

In 1984, 500 suffragists, and the curious had gathered in front of the gold domed Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill to see the twenty-three-year-old embark on her epic two-wheel world tour. The woman of the hour arrived in a carriage, dressed in traditional Victorian attire of floor sweeping skirt, and tailored jacket with billowing sleeves. Missing from the crowd was Max and their three children, a sign he thought his wife was meshugineh, Yiddish for crazy. Her luggage consisted of underwear, a Smith & Weston pearl-handled pistol, and a book put out by the League of American Wheelmen that provided details such as road conditions, directions, and places that provided cyclists with food stops and accommodations. The onlookers watched as Annie disappeared in the distance.

Annie left Boston through the area known as the Fens (from which the city’s Fenway Park derives its name), and followed the Boston Post Road, the historic mail route that linked the city to New York in the Revolutionary days. She continued cycling on to Providence, Rhode Island, where she stopped for the night. The trip took nine hours, an impressive feat for a cycling novice. The accomplishment was further notable as her Columbia bicycle weighed forty-two pounds, she wore heavy clothing, and many roads were unpaved. She continued through Connecticut until she arrived in New York City where the temperatures were the highest in thirteen years. Despite ninety-five-degree heat, several hundred people were in attendance in New York’s City Hall to see her off. Annie crossed the Harlem River on the Washington Bridge, passed through Poughkeepsie, and rode into Albany. When unable to obtain lodging, she slept outdoors, under bridges, or in barns. If there were no restaurants, she dug into her supply of apples. She also needed to be creative in relieving herself when there were no available facilities. While Annie Cohen Kopchovsky’s life had been bound by Boston’s St. Charles River, Mlle. Annie Londenderry was on her way to the modern metropolis of Chicago. Upon her arrival, she was exhilarated at making it to her first major destination but simultaneously exhausted from her exposure to the elements and unrelenting physical exertion that had resulted in her losing twenty pounds. Moreover, she realized that travelling west had been a tactical error as it would be impossible to cross the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Cascades before winter when snow would make her route an impossibility.

While in the Windy City, Annie walked into the Sterling Cycle Works that produced twenty-pound bicycles. They made a deal: in exchange for a free male model, she would advertise their brand rather than Columbia’s. Another result of the collaboration was because she would be riding a man’s bike, she had to wear bloomers that further lightened her load. In addition, the new garment freed Annie from having to hold down a billowing skirt when the wind threatened her modesty. When she had first started out, in answer to a reporter’s question as to why she was not wearing bloomers she had replied, “I could not bring myself to wear the bloomers some women cyclists wear. Although I’ve cheek enough to go round the world, I’ve not enough cheek for that.”  Her new fashion further buried the Orthodox Ms. Kopchocky.

With her lighter physical load and with the hopes of untold women riding on her handlebars, Annie determined to persevere. However, when she had planned her itinerary, she had not factored in weather conditions. Due to the onslaught of winter, she had to pedal back to New York and resume her journey from the east, rather than the west. The problem with her updated plan is, through poor planning, she had frittered away three months of her allotted fifteen. After arriving in Buffalo, its local newspaper, the Buffalo Courier, wrote that Annie was a “clever and intrepid little wheel-woman. A bright and vivacious little person, possessed of any amount of grit and pluck.” When the reporter asked what she would do with her earnings if she won the contest, Annie replied, “Why, I’ll marry some good man and settle down in his life.” In Buffalo, Annie decided that even bloomers did not do the trick, and she purchased a $5.00 pair of boys’ pants that she refashioned into a knickerbocker style. The Courier wrote of her attire, “an extraordinary and exceedingly unfeminine costume.” Her attire was further unconventional as pinned to her clothing were numerous advertising papers from sponsors’ she had met en route.

 

From Manhattan, Annie sailed for Le Havre, France, on La Touraine, where she arrived on December 3, her daughter Mollie’s sixth birthday. Her arrival was less than auspicious: officials impounded her bicycle and thieves made off with her money. After she persuaded custom officials to release her bicycle, they shipped it to Paris. In the year 1894, France held several luminaries: Louis Pasteur, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; it also held the six-year-old Eiffel Tower. Bicycles, which the French termed vélocipèdes, (rapid feet) were ever present on Parisian boulevards. When Annie arrived in Marseilles, the people feted the traveler who had assumed the proportions of a celebrity. A crowd filled the city’s Crystal Palace to catch a glimpse of the sensation who circled the room on her ivory and gold Sterling bicycle while an orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise.” Two days later, thousands bid adieu to Mlle Londonberry as a bugle and drum corps and a phalanx of local cyclists escorted her the Sydney. The

steamer would transport her along the Mediterranean towards the Suez Canal. Her foreign itinerary was to make her way her two-wheel way through Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Alexandria, India, Singapore, Japan, Saigon, Hong Kong, Ceylon, (now Sri Lanka). and Shanghai. As she cycled through various latitudes and longitudes, Annie, equal parts Barnum and Bailey, Nellie Bly, and the New Woman, (the term for women fighting for gender equality, signed and sold souvenirs and demonstrated her riding skills. She also delivered lectures, that the press picked up, many of which were in the realm of tall tales. Some of the latter was bandits had waylaid her in France, that she had hunted Bengal tigers in India, that she had been on the front lines of the Sino-Japanese War where a bullet had pierced her shoulder. She skirted questions about her personal life and embroidered the truth. At various times she claimed she was a Harvard medical student, lawyer, an accountant. Truth remained behind the curtain.

Many aspects of Annie’s accounts may have been in the realm of fiction, perhaps borne from wishful thinking. Her great grandson, Peter Zheutlin, who has published books on his fascinating great-grand aunt, stated that it was "virtually certain, for example, that she made up the gambling story to spice up her journey." As to her verbal travelogue, the reality is that she did navigate the globe with a bicycle rather than always on one. The likelihood is that from western Europe through the Middle East, from Marseilles to Yokohama, her means of transportation was the steamship.

When Mlle. Londonderry returned to America, in San Francisco 4,200 letters from fans awaited, 147 of them “proposals of marriage from men of wealth and nobility.” While she never took any of these gentlemen up on their marital offers, Annie did have an interlude. In Rochelle, Rochelle, a lyric applied to Annie, “Along the way things got a little strange and erotic…”.  Mark Johnson, a cyclist from San Francisco’s Olympic Club began an affair with the celebrated Mlle. Londonderry. The reason why trip took five weeks when they could have covered the distance in five was they wanted to spend time together, and not just atop their bicycles. The cyclists reached Los Angeles; they had to walk the last twenty-four-mile stretch as the Sterling had a flat tire. In the City of Angels, the couple parted; they never met again. Perhaps the reason they did not remain together was, because the New Woman was more Annie Cohen Kopchovsky than Mlle. Londonderry.

 

What is true about her travel was the first leg of her journey, from Boston to Chicago, and the last, from San Francisco to Chicago, was undertaken on two wheels, thereby making her the first female cyclist to cross America. By 1895, Annie and what had become her appendage, her bicycle, had arrived back in Boston. The New World declared her world trek was “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman.” Her appearance and attire were vastly different from when she had departed; her broken arm was in a sling. Also vastly different were her accounts of her mishap. In one version she claimed she had collided with a farmer; in another, in Iowa, she drove into a “a drove of pigs.”

Fifteen months to the day after setting off from Boston’s State House, Annie returned, a news event reported from Honolulu to Milan. Reunited with her family, her bicycle days were put on memory’s shelf. The Kopchovskys moved to New York where Annie had a brief stint as a feature writer for the New York World under the byline, “The New Woman.” Perhaps in a bid to once more something other than Anne Kopchovsky, she wrote an account, an amalgam of fact and fiction, for the New York Sunday World under the byline Nellie Bly Jr. In the Bronx, Max and Annie opened Kay & Company, a clothing business that employed twenty people. When a fire destroyed their building, they used the insurance money to open another enterprise in Manhattan, Grace Strap & Novelty.

Two years after her return, the couple Freida, their fourth child. In a surprising move, the Orthodox Max and Frieda sent their three oldest to Catholic boarding schools. Simon attended a Catholic school in Arthabaskaville, Quebec, Canada. Millie and Libbie went to a French-speaking school run by Dominican Sisters in Lewiston, Maine. Max died in 1946, and Annie passed away from a stroke the following year. Their graves are in Riverside Cemetery, Saddle Brook, New Jersey, as are all their children except Molly, who was not mentioned in her parents’ New York Times death announcements. Molly had converted to Roman Catholicism and became Sister Marie Thaddea of Sion. As a nun, she moved to Saskatchewan, Canada, where she spent her life in a convent. When Mollie wrote home, her parents recited the Hebrew prayer for the dead and burned her letters. They never saw their oldest daughter again. To ensure the Catholic Church would not receive any of their hard-earned money, they disinherited Molly.

While many of her contemporaries condemned Annie for rejecting her maternal role, Susan B. Anthony would have approved of her as the embodiment of a New Woman. The suffragist wrote of female cyclists, “The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

 

 

 

 

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