EFFIE HOTCHKISS

mid the women’s suffrage movement—five years prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment—daughter-mother duo Effie and Avis Hotchkiss took a journey that would cement them into motorcycling’s history as the first women to take a motorcycle/sidecar across the US and back. On May 2, 1915, these two women departed Brooklyn, New York, for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, aboard a sidecar-equipped 1915 Harley-David son, Effie stated, “We merely wanted to see America and considered that the three-speed Harley-David son for myself, and sidecar for mother and the luggage [were] best suited for the job.”