Throughout world history, there has been a cause and effect relationship between women’s cycling and feminism. The American women's rights activists, Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), for example, contended that the bicycle has contributed more towards women’s emancipation than anything else in the world. It is also a fact, from the 2010 statistics, that Burkina Faso is the only non-European country where 84 per cent of households own a bicycle. This paper examines the contribution of cycling in women’s emancipation in Burkina Faso,
“the country of the two wheels”. Through an analysis of two literary works written by Burkinabe authors, from a feminist perspective, namely Pierre Claver Ilboudo’s Adama(2017) and Noëlie Yaogo’s The Odds are against Cycling (2012), this paper posits that the bicycle is a hard-work training tool which predisposes women cyclists into taking on roles previously reserved to men in society. The bicycle helps housebound women, like the ones in Adama, escape from the house and join the women in Yaogo’s novel who are committed to cycling against the odds for a better future.

Bicycle, feminism, emancipation, Burkinabe culture, patriarchy