From Women in Sport to Cultural Critique: A Review of Books about Women in Sport and Physical Culture

INTRODUCTION Scholarly interest in issues that pertain women and sports developed in Canada, England, and the United States at approximately the same time and somewhat earlier than it did in other western countries. Research began in the late 1960s within the context of second-wave feminism and focused primarily on the female athlete. In the late 1970s, the focus of research began shift away from the female athlete toward the concept of gender and a critique of sport and physical culture.' More recently interest has shifted yet again, focusing not on gender as a distinct category but as a dynamic, relational process. It has become a perspective and an interpretation, a way of looking at issues through the lens of gender. Such perspectives have led investigations concerning gender relations and issues of a more transnational nature. By reviewing some of the most influential books that have been written in English, this essay traces the development of ideas in the discourse and gives an overview of the way in which these ideas have transformed our views and extended our understandings of the female athlete and the nature of sport as a cultural institution and cultural construct. The essay will also examine the way in which these books have influenced our views concerning identity and difference in sport that transcend national boundaries and categories of race, class, and gender. In so doing, this essay attempts place these ideas in the context of the development of both feminist theory and theories in sports studies.ii FEMINIST INTEREST IN SPORT AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY As sport historian Roberta Park has written, feminists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recognized that physical strength and the right exercise and be physically educated are feminist issues.iii In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that she wished to persuade women endeavor acquire strength of both mind and body . . . a character as a human being. Further, Wollstonecraft argued that girls should be allowed take the exercises as and then the question of the natural superiority of males could be answered. As Park (1994) noted six decades later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton expressed the same view when writing for The Lily, suggesting that when girls were given the same physical freedoms as boys in romping, swimming, climbing, and playing, they would prove be as physically capable as boys. During Cady Stanton's life, the first books pertaining women and physical activity were written, and these were devoted the development of calisthenics and gymnastics programs for women, which appeared in a number of countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.(TM) In the United States, Catharine Beecher's book, Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families, introduced an interest in the physical activity and health of young women in 1856 as programs of physical culture and gymnastics were being developed in the United States and in countries of Western Europe.v More than a century later, with the development of second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir recognized the importance of physical activity as a feminist issue as her predecessors had done. In The Second Sex, De Beauvoir remarked that woman should swim, climb mountain peaks, pilot an airplane, battle against the elements, take risks, go out for adventure, and she will not feel before the world . . . timidity.vi In De Beauvoir's lifetime, the study of women and sport began in earnest in the context of the rebirth of the women's movement and the women's sports movement in North America and Great Britain in the 1960s, as increasing numbers of females entered competitive sports. At this time, physical educators began show interest in the influence of sport on women, and they saw the need analyze the social dimensions of women's participation in sport. EARLIEST RESEARCH CONCERNING WOMEN AND SPORT In 1965, when the discipline of physical education was becoming more academic and theoretically oriented in the United States, the work of Eleanor Metheny opened the way for a more scholarly approach the study of women and sport. …

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