All my life I have been terrified of motorcycles. My father (who has a flare for the dramatic), called myself and my two brothers upstairs one day and sat us down in a row in front of him. After staring at each of us for a full minute so we understood the gravity of the situation he declared, "If any of you show up on a motorcycle - either as drivers or on the back - I will chop it into pieces with a hatchet. Got it?" Three sets of wide-eyed children gulped and nodded.

Since that day, whenever we even heard a motorcycle he would repeat his hatchet threat. It was a simple equation really. Motorcycles = hatchet. Maybe a parent in jail. It was an equation we decided not to test.

And that is why I was 25-years old before I ever even sat on a motorcycle. Unfortunately for my father, he failed to instill a fear of anything else into me. I thank him for it (internally) everyday. And so when I was asked by a friend I had just met if I would like to travel with him on the back of his bike in Argentina I gave a resounding yes. I thought I would go for a week or two, see a country on my dream list, and maybe get dropped off in Chile where I could begin teaching English and learning Spanish. I stayed 5 months, fell madly in love with bikes, and within a month of returning home I had completed my learner's course.

And that is how and why I found myself in Belgium in August for a Horizons Unlimited Motorcycle Travelers meeting, meeting awesome women who truly give definition to fun fearless women.

Before last year, women on bikes often conjured images of leather and suggestive poses draped over the bike. Why is it that whenever women take control and use their power it has the full potential to resemble pornography? Is it a way to invalidate us? To take our power way? Because that is exactly what riding the bike is. It's both freedom and power. If you ever feel life is a box full of restrictions for your age, gender, sexuality, or otherwise, come to a Horizons Unlimited meeting and go to the Women's Only section. You realize the world is your own to create, and that you can make a difference in both your own life and the lives of others. The women ranged in age from 20 to 65, and their journeys ranged from around the city to around the world. Talk covered everything from the Diva Cup (because its hard to find sanitary protection in the Himalayas and you don't want to fill your bike boxes with 6 months of supplies for 2 women) to organizing a bike tour from England to India to fundraise for women's shelters. It was here I also learned of the Women's International Motorcycle Association (WIMA). And on their Pioneer Women's page I was again blown away by how much of women's history is silenced and robbed from us on a regular basis.

I like to think that I have an awareness when it comes to women's history. When I hear talk of how women began to enter the paid work force after the Second World War, I want to scream. Tell that to the women and children working in the factories since the 1700s, to domestic workers, or gasp oh the horror - to prostitutes, the many women whose experience is lost because they were not white upper class women. What we really want to say is that the Second World War saw a change that allowed the beginning of the end of the middle class housewife ideal. But then maybe that is too much of a mouthful, or too many other questions can be asked from creaking open that door. I am constantly reminded just how male centric our society and history is whenever I come across phenomenal women and I go, "Wow."

Yet I never would've went "wow" finding these stories about men. I rarely question the dominance of the male hero in our war movies, and yet on the WIMA page I learned that Hazel Mayes, the founding member of the Australian WIMA, in World War II was a volunteer motorcycle dispatch rider and joined the RAAF training to become an aircraft engineer. I was awe inspired.

What does upset me is how it makes me realize how much and how often I am robbed from history on a regular basis. And how it is so acceptable we don't even think to challenge it. Think of the "sanitation" of women's history. When we finally do get to read and hear about women's history we rarely get to learn the sexy parts. Women in history are still very much the Madonnas or the whores. And we don't speak of the whores. And not just for women either, but the cleansing of everything and everyone that just doesn't fit with the national myths we like to build and sell as a package to society at large, and that seem to be challenged by few. I want to challenge the mainstream history that perpetuates a history without gender, a history that destroys the feminine, and therefore a society that does the same. A society that still sees women as sex objects rather than sexual beings. A society that when they think of motorcycles, still see women on the back, and not driving for as long as the men have.

If you can't make it to a travelers motorcycle meeting because of time or financial restrictions then check out the Women's International Motorcycle Association and their pioneer women's page at http://www.wimaworld.com/. You at least walk away knowing that a piece of women's history that has been robbed and silenced has been kept alive out there; we just need to discover it.

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