Against the Current: Women Who Shaped Riding Culture from the Margins

The Riding Collective — Research Study 003
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026

Introduction: The Archive Cannot Be Complete Without This Study

Every archive has silences. Some are accidental — the film was lost, the magazine folded, nobody thought to write it down. But the silences in riding culture's historical record are not accidental. They are structural. Women were present at the origins of nearly every discipline the Collective documents. They surfed, they rode, they raced, they built. And then — through formal bans, economic exclusion, social pressure, and the simple, brutal mechanism of not being photographed, not being quoted, not being named — they were edited out of the story.

This is not a study about women who overcame obstacles to succeed in men's sports. That framing concedes the premise — that riding culture belongs to men and women are guests in it. The historical record does not support that premise. Women were not latecomers who fought their way in. In many disciplines, they were there first. What happened was not exclusion from a pre-existing culture. It was expropriation of a culture they helped create.

The Collective's archive — its timeline, its legends hall, its sacred sites — reflects this distortion. Of the riders currently in the Legends archive or consideration queue, fewer than fifteen percent are women. The timeline entries that reference women's contributions can be counted on two hands. The sacred sites are described in language that defaults to male experience. This is not because the Collective is hostile to women's history. It is because the Collective built its archive from available sources, and the available sources were already filtered.

This study is a corrective. It is also an accounting — a specific, name-by-name, date-by-date record of who did what, who was erased, and what the Collective's archive must add to become honest.

I want to be direct about my position. I am a woman who rides. I ride horses in terrain that my grandmother rode in southern Chile. I surf waves that Hawaiian women surfed centuries before any European touched the Pacific. I ski mountains that Sami women crossed on wooden boards before anyone called it sport. This study is personal. It is also, I believe, the most important research the Collective has commissioned. An archive that records only half the story is not an archive. It is a myth.

Methodology

This study was conducted over eleven months, from May 2025 through April 2026. It required different methods than the Collective's previous two studies, because the material is harder to find — by design.

Oral histories. I conducted fifty-three recorded interviews with women riders across eight disciplines, in fourteen locations across the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, France, Australia, Hawai'i, Chile, and Morocco. Ages ranged from nineteen to eighty-four. The oldest interviewees — women who rode in the 1950s and 1960s — provided testimony that exists nowhere in the published record. Several asked that their names not be used, not because they feared anything now, but because decades of being dismissed had taught them that speaking publicly about their contributions would be met with disbelief or condescension. I honored those requests. Their words are here. Their names are theirs to share when they choose.

Archival research. I reviewed surf, skate, cycling, motorcycle, and equestrian media from 1890 to 2025. The methodology here was specifically forensic: not reading for what was published about women, but reading for the gaps. When a competition result lists no women, was it because no women competed, or because women were barred from entry? When a photo caption credits "riders" without names, and the riders are women, what does that tell us? When a technique is attributed to a man, and an earlier woman practitioner can be documented, what happened? The answers were rarely ambiguous. The pattern was consistent: women were present, then absent from the record.

Academic literature. This study draws on published scholarship including Holly Thorpe's work on gender in action sports, Krista Comer's Surfer Girls in the New World Order, the historical cycling research of Sue Macy (Wheels of Change), and Lisa Borden's documentation of women in skateboarding. Where academic sources conflict with rider testimony, I have noted both accounts.

Limitations. The pre-1960s record is thin everywhere, but catastrophically thin for women of color. Hawaiian women's surfing before and during colonization is attested in missionary accounts, oral histories, and the work of scholars like Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, but the women themselves left almost no first-person record — because the colonial apparatus that suppressed their surfing also suppressed their literacy and language. Black women's cycling in the 1890s is similarly under-documented. I have tried to be honest about what I can substantiate and what I can only point toward. The gaps in this study mirror the gaps in the archive. They are the subject, not just the limitation.

Chapter 1: The Invisible Pioneers (Pre-1960s)

Women on Waves Before Colonization

The oldest evidence of wave riding comes from Polynesia, and it does not belong to men.

When Captain James Cook's expedition reached Hawai'i in 1778, the crew documented both men and women surfing — because surfing was not gendered. It was woven into Hawaiian society at every level. The ali'i (royalty) surfed on longer boards (olo) at breaks reserved for chiefs, while commoners surfed on shorter boards (alaia) at other breaks. Women of the ali'i class surfed the royal breaks. Missionary accounts from the early nineteenth century describe women riding waves with the same frequency and skill as men. William Ellis, in his 1825 Journal of a Tour Around Hawaii, specifically notes women surfing.

What happened next is not a story about surfing. It is a story about colonization. The Calvinist missionaries who arrived in the 1820s viewed surfing as idle, hedonistic, and sexually provocative — men and women riding waves together, minimally clothed. They suppressed it. Surfing declined sharply through the mid-nineteenth century, and when it was revived in the early twentieth century by figures like Duke Kahanamoku and the Waikiki beach boys, the revival was male-dominated — not because women had never surfed, but because colonization had broken the cultural continuity that included them.

The erasure was so complete that when modern surf culture developed in the 1950s and 1960s, it treated women's participation as novel — as if Gidget were the first girl to want a wave, rather than the inheritor of a tradition a thousand years old that had been stolen and returned without its women.

Riding Aside, Riding Disguised

The equestrian world has its own archaeology of erasure. Women have ridden horses for as long as horses have been ridden — the Scythian burial sites of the Eurasian steppe, dating to the fifth century BCE, contain women interred with riding equipment and weapons, suggesting mounted female warriors that later generations dismissed as legend until the bones said otherwise.

In the modern era, the mechanism was the sidesaddle. From roughly the fourteenth century through the early twentieth century, European and American women of the upper classes were required to ride aside — one leg hooked over a pommel, the body twisted, the rider fundamentally compromised in her ability to control the horse. The justification was propriety. The effect was control. A woman riding sidesaddle could not gallop safely cross-country, could not jump with confidence, and could not compete on equal terms with men who rode astride. The sidesaddle was not a seat. It was a cage.

Women broke out of it individually, often in disguise. Alicia Thornton raced publicly against men in England in 1804 and 1805, riding astride, and was treated as a scandal rather than a pioneer. In the American West, women ranchers rode astride as a matter of survival — you cannot work cattle from a sidesaddle — but this practical reality was erased from the popular narrative, which preferred the image of the lady on the porch. By the time women were formally permitted to ride astride in international competition — the 1952 Helsinki Olympics were the first to allow women in dressage — women had been riding competently for millennia. The permission was not a beginning. It was an admission.

The Bicycle and the Body

The bicycle did something in the 1890s that no riding discipline had done before: it gave women unsupervised mobility.

Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that the bicycle had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." She was not exaggerating. Before the bicycle, a woman's movement in public space was constrained by chaperonage, by the physicality of corsets and long skirts, and by the simple fact that walking is slow and horse-keeping is expensive. The safety bicycle — the chain-driven, pneumatic-tired design that became affordable in the early 1890s — changed the physics of women's lives.

The backlash was immediate and medical. Doctors warned of "bicycle face" — a supposed condition of exhaustion and strain. They warned that cycling would damage women's reproductive organs. They warned that the saddle would cause sexual stimulation. What they were actually warning about was autonomy. A woman on a bicycle could go where she wanted, when she wanted, without asking permission. The rational dress movement — the adoption of bloomers and divided skirts that made cycling physically possible — was as much a revolution in bodily autonomy as it was in fashion.

Annie Londonderry (Annie Cohen Kopchovsky) rode a bicycle around the world in 1894-1895, completing the journey in fifteen months. Kittie Knox, a Black woman from Boston, challenged the League of American Wheelmen's color bar by showing up to their 1895 meet in Asbury Park, New Jersey, membership card in hand, and riding. Both women are absent from the Collective's timeline. Both should be in it. The bicycle's role as a liberation technology for women is not a footnote to cycling history. It is one of the most consequential chapters in the history of riding.

Chapter 2: The Locked Gate (1960s-1980s)

Formal Exclusion

The postwar expansion of riding culture — the surf boom, the skate explosion, the motocross surge, the cycling renaissance — was built on a foundation of formal and informal exclusion that was so pervasive it became invisible. It was not invisible to the women who encountered it. It was invisible to the men who enforced it, because they experienced it as normal.

The mechanisms were specific. Women were banned from competing in professional motocross in the United States until the late 1970s. The AMA did not sanction a women's motocross national championship until 1979. Before that, women who wanted to race had two options: don't, or race unsanctioned events organized by and for women in conditions that no male professional would have tolerated — no medical support, no prize money, borrowed tracks on off-days.

Kerry Kleid sued the AMA in 1971 for the right to compete in motocross. She was twenty years old. She had to go to court to be allowed to race a motorcycle. She won her case, competed, and is largely forgotten. The men she raced against are in the record books. She is a legal footnote.

In surfing, women were not formally banned from most competitions — they were simply not invited, not scheduled, and not paid. The women's divisions at surf contests through the 1970s and 1980s were afterthoughts: shorter heats, smaller waves, fraction-of-a-percent prize money. Margo Oberg, who won her first world title in 1968 at age fifteen, competed for decades at a level that would have made her wealthy if she had been male. She was not wealthy. She was, for much of her career, barely sponsored.

The Skateboard Boys' Club

Skateboarding's exclusion was less formal and more cultural, which made it harder to fight because there was no rule to challenge — just a atmosphere of hostility so thick it functioned as a wall.

The parks, the shops, the magazines, the videos — skateboarding's entire infrastructure was built by and for teenage boys and young men. Women who showed up at skateparks in the 1970s and 1980s were subjected to harassment ranging from mockery to physical intimidation. Patti McGee, who became the first women's national skateboard champion in 1965 and appeared on the cover of Life magazine, saw her career effectively end when the first skate boom collapsed — and when skating returned in the 1970s, the culture had hardened into a masculinity so aggressive that women's participation dropped to near zero.

Cara-Beth Burnside, who began skating in the early 1980s, has spoken extensively about the hostility she faced — not from every individual, but from the culture itself. The magazines did not cover women. The videos did not feature women. The sponsors did not sign women. When she won contests, the prize money for the women's division was a fraction of the men's — sometimes literally a hundred dollars versus tens of thousands. She is one of the most talented transition skaters in the history of the discipline. She had to supplement her income throughout her career because skating would not pay her what it paid men of lesser ability.

Maria Gutierrez and Her Generation

Maria Gutierrez — now a council member in our own Collective — came up in this era. She has spoken about it with the precision of someone who kept count. The number of times she was the only woman in a lineup. The number of times she was told the women's heat was cancelled due to insufficient entries — entries that were insufficient because no outreach was done, no accommodation was made, no signal was sent that women were welcome. The number of times she heard "you ride pretty good for a girl," which is not a compliment. It is a cage dressed as praise.

Her generation — the women who rode through the 1970s and 1980s despite everything — are the bridge between the pioneers who were erased and the current generation who benefits from their persistence. They are the least celebrated and most essential link in the chain. Without them, there is no chain. They held the line when the culture was actively trying to push them out. The Collective owes them more than an archive entry. It owes them an apology for how long that entry took.

Chapter 3: Parallel Worlds (1980s-2000s)

When You Cannot Join, You Build

The most consequential response to exclusion was not infiltration. It was construction. When the main culture locked women out, women built parallel cultures — and some of those parallel cultures became more vital, more innovative, and more durable than the institutions that rejected them.

Roller Derby's Resurrection

Roller derby's third wave — the one that matters, the one that lasted — was born in Austin, Texas in 2001, and it was built entirely by women. The founding of what became the Texas Rollergirls, and subsequently the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), was not a campaign for inclusion in an existing sport. It was the creation of a new one. Women wrote the rules. Women built the tracks. Women governed the leagues. Women created the culture — the names, the aesthetics, the ethics of inclusion that made derby the most explicitly feminist, queer-affirming athletic community in the world.

By 2010, WFTDA had over 400 member leagues across five continents. Derby did not ask for a seat at anyone's table. It built its own table, and the table was better. The DIY infrastructure — skater-owned, skater-operated, funded by bout revenue and bake sales and sheer force of will — proved that women could run a sport from top to bottom without institutional permission. Study 002 documented roller derby's post-COVID fragility. This study documents its origin as a specifically feminist act of creation: the most successful parallel culture women have built in the history of riding.

Women's Surf Culture in the 1990s

In surfing, the parallel culture was quieter but no less real. By the early 1990s, a generation of women surfers — Lisa Andersen, Layne Beachley, Keala Kennelly, Rochelle Ballard — were surfing at a level that demanded recognition. Andersen's four consecutive world titles (1994-1997) and her famous Surfer magazine cover line ("Lisa Andersen surfs better than you") cracked something open. But the structural inequities persisted: women's events received a fraction of the prize money, a fraction of the webcast time, a fraction of the media coverage.

What women surfers built in response was a network — informal, global, sustained by relationships rather than institutions. Women's surf camps, women's surf media (publications like SurfGirl, founded 2001), women's coaching programs, and eventually women's advocacy organizations like the Committee for Equity in Women's Surfing (CEWS), which successfully lobbied for women to surf the big-wave event at Mavericks beginning in 2016. Keala Kennelly's charging at Teahupoo — riding one of the heaviest waves on earth — was not just athletic achievement. It was a refusal to accept the premise that big waves were men's territory. The wave did not care about her gender. The culture did. She ignored the culture and rode the wave.

Women's BMX and the DIY Ethic

In BMX, women's participation was so marginal through the 1980s and 1990s that the parallel culture was less a movement than a scattered network of individuals who found each other slowly. Women's BMX racing had a small but persistent community, but freestyle — the discipline that generated the culture, the media, the sponsorships — was almost entirely closed. The breakthroughs came in the 2000s, with riders like Nina Buitrago and Caroline Buchanan pushing into a space that offered them almost nothing in return. The formation of organizations like Women's BMX Alliance and the gradual inclusion of women's events in X Games (women's BMX park was added in 2018) were victories extracted from institutions that had been indifferent for decades.

The pattern across all three — derby, surfing, BMX — is the same. Women did not wait for the gate to open. They walked around it. The parallel cultures they built were not consolation prizes. They were proof of concept: proof that women's riding culture was not a subset of men's riding culture. It was its own thing, with its own values, its own aesthetics, and its own infrastructure. The question was never whether women could ride. The question was whether the institutions would acknowledge what women had already built.

Chapter 4: The Current Generation

What Has Changed

The current generation of women riders operates in a landscape that would be unrecognizable to Maria Gutierrez's generation — and that is partly Maria Gutierrez's generation's doing, whether the current generation knows it or not.

Prize money parity has arrived in some disciplines. The World Surf League announced equal prize money in 2019 — a decision that was forty years overdue but real. The UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) has expanded women's professional road cycling, with the Tour de France Femmes (relaunched in 2022 after decades of failed attempts) giving women a grand tour with live television coverage. Skateboarding's Olympic inclusion in 2021 created women's divisions that, for the first time, received identical broadcast treatment to men's. The 2024 Paris Olympics saw women competing in every riding-adjacent discipline the Games includes.

Women riders are building their own platforms without waiting for media gatekeepers. Social media has done what decades of advocacy could not: it has made women's riding visible at scale, without requiring the permission of magazine editors who were, historically, men. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have allowed riders like Leticia Bufoni (skateboarding), Bethany Hamilton (surfing), and Rachel Atherton (mountain biking) to build audiences that rival or exceed those of their male counterparts. The economics of visibility have shifted.

What Has Not Changed

The gap between visibility and power remains vast.

Women's events in most action sports still receive less media coverage, less sponsorship investment, and less organizational support than men's. The WSL's equal prize money applies to events — but the number of women's events, the length of competition windows, and the quality of conditions allocated to women's heats remain subjects of ongoing dispute. In skateboarding, the structural inequity has shifted from prize money to infrastructure: women's park sections, women's coaching programs, and women's access to premier facilities remain drastically underfunded compared to men's.

In equestrian sports — where women now constitute the majority of participants at every level below the very top — the governance structures remain disproportionately male. The FEI (Federation Equestre Internationale) and national federations are led predominantly by men, making decisions about a sport whose participant base is predominantly female. This is a different kind of locked gate: not exclusion from participation, but exclusion from governance. Women can ride. They are not yet allowed, in proportional terms, to decide.

In motocross and motorcycle racing, women's participation remains marginal. No woman has competed in a premier-class MotoGP race. Women's motocross receives a fraction of the support of men's. The pipeline problem is real — fewer girls start, so fewer women compete, so fewer role models exist, so fewer girls start. The cycle perpetuates itself in the absence of deliberate intervention.

The most honest assessment I can offer is this: the current generation has more visibility than any generation before it. It has less structural power than the visibility suggests. The women riding today are seen. They are not yet, in most disciplines, the ones making the rules.

Chapter 5: What the Archive Owes

This chapter is a formal recommendation to the Collective's Archive Committee. These are specific names, contributions, and entries that should exist in the Legends hall, the timeline, and the sacred sites index. Their absence is a distortion. Their inclusion is a minimum.

Legends Hall Recommendations

Pre-modern era:

The unnamed ali'i women of Hawai'i who surfed royal breaks before colonization. The Legends hall should include a collective entry acknowledging that the first surfers included women, and that their erasure was an act of colonization, not an absence of skill.

Annie Londonderry (Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, 1870-1947). Cycled around the world in 1894-1895. Pioneer of women's long-distance cycling and, more broadly, of women's autonomous mobility.

Kittie Knox (1874-1900). Black cyclist who challenged the League of American Wheelmen's racial exclusion in 1895. Pioneer at the intersection of race and gender in cycling.

Mid-century:

Margo Oberg (b. 1953). First women's world surfing champion (1968), won three titles across two decades. Competed at the highest level for longer and with less support than any male surfer of comparable ability.

Kerry Kleid (b. ~1951). Sued the AMA in 1971 for the right to race motocross. Legal pioneer whose victory opened sanctioned competition to women.

Patti McGee (1945-2024). First women's national skateboard champion (1965). Life magazine cover. Erased from skateboarding's narrative when the culture masculinized in the 1970s.

Modern era:

Cara-Beth Burnside (b. 1968). One of the greatest transition skaters — male or female — in skateboarding history. Also a professional snowboarder. Competed for decades at prize money levels that were a fraction of men's.

Lisa Andersen (b. 1969). Four consecutive world surfing titles (1994-1997). Changed the perception of women's surfing from sideshow to legitimate athletic discipline.

Keala Kennelly (b. 1978). Charged Teahupoo at sizes that most male surfers will not attempt. Broke the gender barrier in big-wave surfing.

The founders of the Texas Rollergirls / WFTDA (2001-2004). Collective entry. Built the most successful women-led sport organization in modern history from nothing.

Rachel Atherton (b. 1987). Six World Championship titles, forty World Cup victories in downhill mountain biking. The most dominant rider — of any gender — in the modern history of the discipline.

Maria Gutierrez. Our own council member. Rode through the locked-gate era and survived to build what comes next.

Timeline Additions

1778: Cook expedition documents women surfing in Hawai'i. (Corrective entry — surfing's origin must include women from the first recorded observation.)
1804: Alicia Thornton races men on horseback in England, riding astride.
1894: Annie Londonderry begins her around-the-world bicycle journey.
1895: Kittie Knox challenges the League of American Wheelmen's color bar.
1896: Susan B. Anthony's statement on the bicycle and women's emancipation.
1952: Women first permitted to compete in Olympic equestrian events (Helsinki, dressage).
1965: Patti McGee wins first women's national skateboard championship.
1968: Margo Oberg wins first women's world surfing title, age fifteen.
1971: Kerry Kleid sues the AMA for women's right to race motocross.
1979: AMA sanctions first women's motocross national championship.
2001: Texas Rollergirls founded — beginning of roller derby's third wave.
2004: WFTDA established as the first skater-owned, skater-operated governing body in action sports.
2016: Women surf Mavericks for the first time in the competition's history, after CEWS advocacy.
2019: World Surf League announces equal prize money.
2022: Tour de France Femmes relaunched with live broadcast coverage.

Sacred Sites Considerations

Waikiki, O'ahu — already in the archive for surfing's origins, but the entry should explicitly reference women's surfing and the colonial suppression thereof.
Asbury Park, New Jersey — site of Kittie Knox's 1895 challenge to segregated cycling.
Austin, Texas — birthplace of third-wave roller derby.

Conclusion: Against the Current

The title of this study comes from a phrase I heard three times, from three different women, in three different disciplines, in three different countries. A surfer in Hawai'i. A skateboarder in London. A horse rider in Jalisco. Each of them, describing what it felt like to pursue riding as a woman, used the same image: swimming against the current.

The current is not malice. It is not, in most cases, a single person or institution deliberately holding women back. It is the accumulated weight of a hundred years of defaults — defaults about who rides, who matters, who gets photographed, who gets paid, who gets named. The current is what happens when a culture builds its institutions and its archives and its legends around one half of its participants and then treats the other half's contributions as exceptional rather than foundational.

Swimming against the current is exhausting. Every woman I interviewed for this study knew the exhaustion. The ones who had been riding for decades wore it differently than the ones who had just started, but they all recognized it. It is the fatigue of having to prove, over and over, that you belong in a space your predecessors helped create.

What this study documents is not a women's history of riding. It is the missing half of riding's history — full stop. The ali'i women who surfed before colonization are not a sidebar to surfing's origin. They are surfing's origin. Annie Londonderry is not a footnote to cycling history. She is cycling history. Kerry Kleid is not a curiosity of motocross trivia. She is the reason women race today.

The Collective was built on the principle that riding culture is one culture, crossing disciplines, crossing borders, crossing generations. This study argues that it must also cross the longest border of all: the one between the half of the story that was told and the half that was suppressed.

The women documented here — the named and the unnamed, the pioneers and the parallel builders, the ones who sued and the ones who simply showed up and refused to leave — did not ride against the current because they wanted to make a point. They rode because riding was theirs. The wave was theirs. The horse was theirs. The board, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the track, the mountain, the street — theirs. The current that pushed against them was not natural. It was constructed. And everything they built — the parallel cultures, the advocacy organizations, the legal precedents, the sheer undeniable archive of performance — was constructed too. Against the current. On purpose. Without permission.

The archive owes them their names. This study is a start.

— Dr. Maren Solvik
Tromsoe / Valparaiso
April 2026

Study classification: Public
Review status: First edition — subject to community review and amendment per Riding Collective Research Standards, Section 6
Next review date: April 2028
Cite as: Solvik, M. (2026). "Against the Current: Women Who Shaped Riding Culture from the Margins." The Riding Collective Research Archive, Study 003.

Against the Current