Women in Sports History: A successful sequel, ten years on

Susanna Hedenborg
Department of Sport Sciences, Malmö University

Just over ten years ago, editors Carol A. Osborne and Fiona Skillen published the book Women in Sports History (2011). The editors introduced the field by establishing that the history of women’s sports had until then been relatively forgotten by both sports historians and gender historians in Great Britain. In the present book, Women in Sports History. Ten Years On (2023) they tackle the issue again. The editors call their introduction ‘Women in sports history: the more things change, the more they stay the same’ and emphasize that there are more articles in sport history journals about women and sport, and that there are more books about women in sport that deal with female Olympians, specific sports and broader studies of grass root participation. Despite that, there seems to be a lack of interest in the area within the broader field of gender history, where studies on women’s sport are barely visible. The same goes for the larger field of history. They also raise questions about whether researchers choose to publish in other ways. Today there are more publication channels when it comes to sports history research and they highlight the online magazine Playing Pasts published by Manchester Metropolitan University, since 2016. In the magazine, there are many articles on women’s sports. In addition, the articles are freely available and written in an accessible way.

He positions the micro history in a skilful way against a background of how cycling (and different kinds of cycling) for women was discussed and advertised.

That women’s sports history has interested more researchers since 2011 is evident from the fact that the authors and the sports analyzed are other than in the previous book. In my review of that book, I wrote that there was reason to examine new source materials and use intersectional perspectives – the new book includes that, which is gratifying. An example is Neil Carter’s chapter in which he demonstrates the importance of using different types of source material to arrive at women’s sports history. In his chapter, the rise of women’s cycling for leisure, commuting and sport is analysed in relation to beauty ideal and the interests of the commercial sector. The story of the first professional cyclist, Marguerite Wilson, is in focus. Carter describes how she was contracted by bicycle companies and had to juggle between ideal femininities and her career during the interwar period.  He positions the micro history in a skilful way against a background of how cycling (and different kinds of cycling) for women was discussed and advertised. In another interesting chapter, Adam McKie examines women’s cricket. Here, too, the juggling of ideals is analysed. Women had to quash the idea that cricket was a man’s game and at the same time maintain respectability. McKie shows that cricket was in no way a bastion for feminism but describes how a conservative and separatist middle-class feminism could be constructed around a sport. Patriarchy was never explicitly challenged, but not reinforced. The women in the Women’s Cricket Association walked a tight rope between attracting and alienating audiences emphasizing gender differences, a reluctance to challenge domesticity and the exclusion of working-class women and girls.

Rafaelle Nicholson and Matthew Taylor examines women’s sports during the Second World War. Here too, oral history, together with other sources, plays an important role.  The authors challenge the assumptions that the war had little impact on women’s physical activity, showing that women’s activities were of high importance during this time. Sport was seen as important for their physical fitness, morale and welfare. Women stepped into new roles, as men left for the army and sport became a fostering arena for a social citizenship as women constituted the home front. In another chapter, Victora Samantha Dawson uses an intersectional analysis and examines women’s roles in Liverpool rugby league football. She shows how women, beyond playing and spectatorship, had important roles to play in the wider sport culture and that this part related to gender, social class and age. The analysis relates to the blurry lines between work and leisure, private and public, and reflects the complexity of the lives that women lived.

However, I have some critical objections too. Perhaps a fairer title of the book would be Women in British sports history. Apart from Katie Taylor’s chapter on women’s opportunities in American football in the decades around the 1900s, only British examples are analysed. In her chapter, Taylor shows that women’s participation presents an anomaly – not least the intersection between social class and gender is interesting as the female participants belong to the middle and upper classes. However, media coverage demonstrates that they were accepted. Even though I’m hesitant about the title I want to underline that the British examples are interesting, but that national – social and cultural – contexts are of great importance for the understanding of men’s and women’s opportunities to play sports.

Karen Fraser’s chapter examines the history of Scottish football from the 1960s onwards. Again, oral history constitutes the source material. She shows men’s resistance, but also how women did not let themselves be hindered. Although women’s football globally is more researched than other sports, the author points out that Scottish women’s football has been left relatively untouched and that the analysis of women’s struggle is interesting, showing that women’s voices constitute important sources.

Another objection concerns the sports that are analysed. When I did the review for the book that Osborne and Skillen published a little over ten years ago, I pointed out that it was extra interesting that sports that were not usually studied in sports history were given space. In this volume, women’s football gets more space. At the same time, I want to emphasize that these analyses are exciting and important for the understanding of how women negotiated gender and social class in relation to sports in different places at different times.

I also want to give the editors a big round of applause for allowing discussions about the source material a large and welcome space. Several of the researchers present and duscuss in some detail the source material, thus making it possible for readers to draw conclusions about the visibility of women in sports and the importance of creating source materials for future historians. In the introduction, the editors point to that future researchers will have more sources than before, not least as the media coverage of women’s sports has increased. They also address the problem that it is difficult to get funding for historical research and that historians must find new ways to finance their research – ways that will also influence how we write history. An illustrative example is given in Gary James chapter on Manchester City football club. He shows how history can be investigated together with various agents, such as the players themselves, the local community and the football club. Using oral history, the experiences of female footballers can be analyzed and provide new knowledge on women’s sports history. The readers get to learn more about women’s football, but also how a collaborative project can be structured and carried out. It is encouraging to see that the collaboration can work in a way in which both the historian and the community can benefit.

Finally, in one section, Osborne and Skillen highlight that the global pandemic, Covid19, affected women’s sports more negatively than men’s sports. Several chapters in the book provide interesting examples of how extreme times such as war and the time between World War I and World War II both prevented and made it possible for women to play sports. This question of how women’s and men’s sports are affected during the pandemic would be interesting to study more comparatively between different sports and countries. From a Swedish perspective, the pandemic does not seem to have affected men’s and women’s sporting activities in the same way as described by Osborne and Skillen for the British case – at least not if we are to trust available statistics, but it would be exciting to analyse gender and sport activities based on contemporary oral history. It is important to know more about the meaning of the activities and how they would fit in during the days of the lockdown to build gender equal societies for the future.

Copyright © Susanna Hedenborg 2024