Why do we say "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"?

Background:

This is a feminist witticism that follows a well-established pattern for such phrases: “A needs B like C needs D.”

Linguists believe the saying in question evolved from similar statements that were originally meant to convey the fact that the subject actually needs the object to thrive. Quote Investigator gives this example from an 1858 newspaper in North Carolina:

What a Bachelor is Like?

From the pen of Launcelot Goosenberry, Esq., Poet Laureate, and dedicated to all Poets and Poetesses around these diggings.

Why a pump without a handle, A mouldy tallow candle,
A goose that’s lost its fellows, A noseless pair of bellows,
A horse without a saddle, A boat without a paddle!
A mule—a fool, A two-legged stool!
A pest—a jest! Dreary, weary, Contrary, uncheery—
A fish without a tail, A ship without a sail…

These phrases were even incorporated into a popular song in the early 1900s, written by EW Rogers. From What Is a Man Without a Woman (sung here by Billy Murray), we get the lyric:

Man without a woman is a ship without a sail,
A boat without a rudder, or a fish without a tail

The meaning of the saying started becoming its opposite (i.e., A doesn’t need B at all) by the end of the 19th century. An 1898 Hartford, Connecticut newspaper published an essay by W.L. Alden in which he wrote:

Along in 1886 I was the American consul at Aragua, a town in the south of Spain about a hundred miles from the coast. The place didn’t need an American consul any more than a cow needs a bicycle; for it had no trade with America, and no American tourist ever dreamed of stopping there.

… and later, from a 1906 article in The Detroit Free Press:

The house didn’t need a fire then any more than a horse needs a shave.

Fast forward a few decades to 1970. Irina Dunn was a student and activist at the University of Sydney, heavily involved in the women’s movement there. She claims to have coined the phrase as we know it today. In a January 2002 email she writes:

I was paraphrasing from a phrase I read in a philosophical text I was reading for my Honours year in English Literature and Language in 1970. It was ‘A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle’. My inspiration arose from being involved in the renascent women’s movement at the time, and from being a bit of a smart-arse. I scribbled the phrase on the backs of two toilet doors, would you believe, one at Sydney University where I was a student, and the other at Soren’s Wine Bar at Woolloomooloo, a seedy suburb in south Sydney. The doors, I have to add, were already favoured graffiti sites.

Dunn went on to serve in the Australian Senate and currently works as a filmmaker and science editor.

The phrase is often misattributed to feminist, political activist, and editor Gloria Steinem, and she did, indeed, use it during her lectures. She’s taken great pains to try to correct the record, however, stating in interviews that Dunn was the person who coined it.

In popular culture, the line was included in the 1991 song by U2, Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World:

Nothin’ much to say I guess
You’re just the same as all the rest
Been tryin’ to throw your arms around the world
And a woman needs a man
Like a fish needs a bicycle
When you’re tryin’ to throw your arms around the world
I’m gonna run to you, run to you, run to you.

It was also featured in a very popular Guinness Beer Commercial in 1996.

More expressions and their source

Challenge yourself with BookBrowse Wordplays