Do you need to be fearless, have ADHD or a death wish to be female and ride a bike in England?

As someone who had to cycle to school with my Dad on a Tandem from 1979 through rush hour Reading, by that point, my Dad was already saying "if you want to kill someone and get away with it, do it in car" and I saw and breathed it all in first hand. It seemed like madness if you weren't sitting in a car. People thought we were crazy and cyclists were invariably very hardy, intellectuals or just plain too poor to afford even to travel by bus.
I visited the Netherlands for the first time in my teens in the early 80's, I got to ride a bike with other people my age who didn't think I had a death wish.
My Mum's been in the Netherlands since 1983 and she's never adopted the Dutch way and by the time she was my age had crippling thrombosis. I have the same thing but it's never developed because I've insisted on cycling - I see the thought of thrombosis worse than being hit by a car. I've been nearly dead many times, some would say I should probably get tested for ADHD. My mum took her English attitude to traffic with her to Holland and called all the mums on bikes with a kid at each end "suicide mums" it was obvious that to her, with her experience of cycling in England, she couldn't see the advantages of not driving.
She has an amazing road bike still in her shed, a Macleans track bike, I wonder what happened in the 70's to her that she's rarely got back on a bike since then.
Especially for women, you generally don't need many near misses to put you off entirely.
We have lost nearly 2 generations of cyclists to cars and it would take the sort of reforms they've started to use for smoking or child protection, with little or no notice to public opinion or profit to turn it round.
It would have to be unpopular in the eyes of many, before proper segregation and strict limitations on through traffic could return cycling levels to where it was in the 1950s. Public opinion and profit would, of course follow.
Giving all the responsibility to the Local Authorities who are notoriously worried about public opinion can't have helped. That and the way they are funded.
When I move back to Holland next week, give me a few months and I'm going to see what can be done with that macleans, it might take a while, it might end up becoming my eldest son's first road bike. In the Netherlands, not in Cambridgeshire, I'll get to do the sort of bike riding with my kids I've always dreamed of.