Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women (RLE Sports Studies)

1870-1914

Kathleen McCrone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138982802
• eBook ISBN: 9781317679639
• Edition: 1

The nineteenth century was a golden age in British sports. Not only were sports immensely popular, but they began to assume the forms and qualities that still characterise them today. Moreover, the latter part of the century saw a significant participation in sports by women, and this book provides the first overall examination of this early development and the social changes that it helped to bring about.

Since women's entry into sports was chiefly a consequence of the campaign for better female education, the book begins with an account of sports at the Oxbridge women's colleges, at the girls' public schools and at the new women's physical training colleges. It then examines team sports such as hockey, lacrosse, and cricket and individual sports such as tennis, golf and cycling. Other chapters discuss the medical attitudes and prejudices toward women's participation in sports and the role of sports in changing female dress.

1

Introduction

Girls are sometimes pretty and wear nice clothes, and can sit on coaches to watch us play cricket … but girls cannot run, jump or climb trees. ¹

Although in recent years Victorian specialists have eagerly cultivated the fields of sport and women’s history, they have produced surprisingly little relating the two areas. Historians of women have neglected the physical dimension of the struggle for emancipation, while historians of sport have reflected sport’s traditional male orientation by virtually ignoring the distaff side, even though the history of women’s participation in sport reflects different themes and patterns and raises different questions from that of men. As W.J. Baker notes, ‘The history of British women in sports … stands high on the agenda of work to be done.’²

Sport is a complex phenomenon which acts as an important agent of both social change and social control and modifies and defines female roles in society at large. Sport creates and reflects tensions surrounding definitions of sex and gender roles, and perhaps more clearly than any other institution reveals how status, functions and power are assigned on the basis of biological differences. Because of the particular place of the body in definitions of woman, and because of the attack of women’s sport on physical norms — the factors that controlled and subordinated women the most — barriers to women’s participation in sport were among the last to fall. Normally a conservative institution, sport is laden with rituals, symbols and preconceptions that disseminate, affirm and reinforce idealised and dominant values. As an essentially male preserve related to other forms of patriarchal control, sport embodies and recreates the principles and practices of gender inequality and male dominance and privilege in other realms of life.

At the same time, however, sport has considerable potential for social disruption, since it can operate as an important channel for underprivileged groups to challenge existing social arrangements and express hostility to and deviance from established norms. Its masculinity makes it an obvious sphere for women to attempt to penetrate — or at the very least to challenge by creating parallel worlds of their own — in their efforts to counter external definitions of female physical and emotional frailty.

In the case of English women in the late-nineteenth century, sport was perplexingly ambiguous because it stood on the threshold between male and female and between the past and future. It was a repressive and constraining mechanism that deliberately idealised maleness and kept women separate from and inferior to men. But it was also a transforming and liberating one, that offered women unprecedented opportunities to free themselves from some of the more entrenched and pervasive tenets of the Victorian ideology of femininity. Sport is therefore an excellent monitor of how far women have travelled along the road to equality and the distance yet to go, and it is crucial to an understanding of society at large and the patterns of social relations in which sport and women were embedded.

Sport and physical recreation have been significant and pervasive forms of social action in the life of England since the Middle Ages. Until recently, however, women’s place in this long and distinguished sporting tradition was peripheral and primarily passive, since sport involved essentially masculine activities requiring physical and psychological attitudes and behaviour considered unnatural to respectable females. It is now known that women were never completely excluded from sport, and that more participated and in more sports than was previously suspected, but the fact remains that women in English sport were a social anomaly for centuries.

During the medieval period separation of roles according to gender was often indistinct among ordinary people. Fresh air and exercise were all in a day’s work for both sexes; and during fairs and holy day festivities women as well as men participated in ball games, foot races and contests of strength. Some women also made a living as itinerant dancers and tumblers, entertaining at court, castles and local celebrations. At the other end of the social spectrum a minority of noble ladies hunted and hawked with considerable skill, either in parties of their own or within protected situations. Until the late-fourteenth century, when Anne of Bohemia, the wife of Richard II, popularised the side-saddle, women often rode astride, like the Wife of Bath, ‘who sat her ambler easily’ . Literary and artistic sources also depict ladies playing with balls; and the first treatise on sport in the English language is attributed to a woman, Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of Sopwell Abbey in Hertfordshire. The Book of St Albans (c. 1486) deals knowledgeably with hunting and hawking, and was so popular that it was reprinted more than any other work of its time except the Bible. The medieval lady’s usual recreations, however, involved needlework and sedentary games of chance. The main sports of the age — archery, fencing and jousting — were related to military training and hence identified with men alone. The lady’s primary sporting role was as spectator who awarded prizes and provided inspiration and applause at tournaments, a passive pose her descendants emulated for centuries.

The medieval pattern of female exercise continued in the early modern period, with common folk playing crude games and the upper classes dancing, hunting and hawking. Henry VIII is said to have complained of the expense of keeping Anne Boleyn in archery equipment;³ and the prowess in the hunting field of Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I is well known. The latter, at the age of 66, was reported to be still ‘exceedingly disposed to hunting, for every second day she is on horseback, and continues the sport long’.⁴ Tudor ladies also played real tennis and battledore and shuttlecock; but there was little physical play and exercise in their education.

Juan Luis Vives, tutor to the Princess Mary and author of The Instruction of a Christian Woman (1524), the leading theoretical manual in Europe on female education, had nothing to say about exercise or games; and while Erasmus expressed concern about the bodily health of little girls, he believed they would derive sufficient exercise from the active performance of household tasks. Similarly, Thomas Elyot, a Tudor bureaucrat who was inspired by Renaissance views on the conjunction of mind and body to write The Governor (1531), the first treatise in English on the value of exercise to the health, character and social success of gentlemen, completely ignored the education of women apart from condescending advice on how to be good wives.

In the seventeenth century Jacobean theories on the patriarchal and hierarchal structure of society combined with changes in productive mechanisms and the growth of commercial capitalism to diminish the status of women. Except during the Puritan revolution, women were subjected to increasing restraints which reinforced the image of a ‘weaker sex’ and reduced opportunities for exercise. Dancing, which was designed to produce graceful movement rather than physical fitness, was the only exercise integral to a young lady’s training. John Locke was one of the few educational reformers to recognise that children of both sexes were physical animals, and that girls as well as boys needed moderate, open-air exercise for reasons of strength and good health. Even embryonic feminists like Bathsua Makin and Mary Astell expressed little interest in physical education. It is thus not surprising to find seeds of the debilitating Victorian concept of femininity in The Ladies’ Dictionary’s advice in 1694 to ‘beware of taking straddling steps or running ahead for those are indecent for a lady’.⁵

Unusual incidents of an exhibitionist nature involving women of the lower classes, such as horse and foot races, and football, boxing and stoolball matches, continued to be recorded. The odd rural Andromache still hunted and rode, occasionally even in breeches, ignoring negative comments about her talk of horses and hounds and audacious leaping over gates. Queen Anne herself was an avid hunter when young, and her love of horse racing led to the laying out of the Ascot course and the acceptance of respectable women as spectators. But such activities were considered exceptional and did nothing to compromise the view that sport was essentially a man’s business.

The situation changed little during the Georgian period, although from the middle of the eighteenth century warnings about the need for girls to have exercise and criticisms of its limitation in the name of gentility appeared in print with increasing frequency. For example, Thomas Gisborne, prebendary of Durham, argued in 1747 that, while girls did not require the hardy amusements of boys, they needed more vigorous bodily exercise in order to become healthy, strong and alert. John Gregory, in his famous advice to daughters in the 1770s, compromised his adherence to the tenets of female inferiority sufficiently to recommend outdoor exercise and horse-back riding energetic enough to produce rosy cheeks and good health. Twenty years later Erasmus Darwin, although convinced that women’s sexual function limited their intellectual capacity and required the cultivation of mildness and reticence, argued that social convention, not nature, made schoolgirls sedentary and that ball games, shuttlecock, dumb-bell exercises and vigorous walking and dancing would improve their health. During the 1790s, too, the bluestockings Catherine Macaulay Graham and Hannah More agreed that female weakness was the result of false notions of beauty and educational regimes that corrupted the powers of the body and mind, and they recommended exercise as an antidote.⁶

Only Mary Wollstonecraft, however, got to the heart of the matter. In her seminal work on the rights of women (1792) she identified the liberation of women’s bodies as among those that most needed vindicating. Wollstonecraft acknowledged the superior bodily strength of men, but urged females to take up masculine types of exercise to demonstrate ‘how far the natural superiority of man extends’. Bodily dependence produced mental dependence and weak mothers weak children, she warned.⁷

A number of works of fictional literature in the eighteenth century also approved of female exercise. George Farquhar’s Silvia (1706) could ‘gallop all the morning after the hunting-horn, and all the evening after a fiddle. In short [she could] do everything with [her] father but drink, and shoot flying’.⁸ Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St Ives (1792) demanded female physical training and called the supposition that men were better able to climb walls than women ‘weakness and folly’.⁹ William Words-worth assured ‘… a Young Lady, who had been reproached for taking long walks in the country’ (1802) that continuation of the habit would make her ‘healthy as a shepherd boy’, in marked contrast to her critics;¹⁰ and in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Northanger Abbey (1818) Jane Austen condoned Elizabeth Bennett’s walking three miles to Netherfield in wet weather and arriving ‘with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with warmth and exercise’ and Catherine Morland’s liking for cricket and ‘all boys’ plays’, and she strongly condemned the censure both heroines received.¹¹

All the arguments about girls’ pressing need of open-air pursuits were assiduously ignored by educational practitioners, however. The growing number of private boarding and day schools for girls from affluent families deliberately neglected genuine physical and mental training in favour of stylish accomplishments. Mistresses supported only demure walking and decorous dancing which supposedly contributed to the becoming postures and social skills required of a polished lady.

The traditional view that English women rarely engaged in sport and physical recreation before the mid-nineteenth century has been challenged recently by Shirley Reekie, who argues that before and during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution women participated in a wide range of activities, the nature and extent of which were largely determined by place of residence and social class.¹² Reekie’s evidence indicates that despite strenuous labour and restricted time for play the common people’s rural sports were a vibrant force in which women participated freely — if with less frequency and variety than men — and that women’s activities included cricket, stoolball, trapball, football, golf, foot races, pugilism, rowing, sword-fighting, swimming and dancing.

Among the upper classes, Reekie claims, social convention, confining fashions and more clearly defined gender roles restricted women’s opportunities for vigorous recreation, while at the same time leisure, affluence and privileges of rank allowed some to ride, hunt, shoot, fish, swim, climb, walk, sail, dance and play battledore and cricket. That sporting ladies were not unknown is confirmed by their appearance in art and literature — John Collet’s famous painting of ‘Miss Wicket and Miss Trigger’ (c. 1770), for example, and the Sporting Magazine’s inclusion, without adverse comment, of occasional articles on ladies who excelled in the field, such as the Marchioness of Salisbury, who enjoyed a national reputation as a daring rider and was master of the Hertfordshire foxhounds from 1775 to 1819.¹³

Reekie nevertheless concludes that only a minority of women in any class were actively involved in sport between 1700 and 1850, and that in the early-nineteenth century among people of all classes and both sexes, sport in general experienced a decline precipitated by a complex combination of forces related to urbanisation, industrialisation and the moral attitudes of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The 'Lady Blue': Sport and Exercise at Oxbridge Women's Colleges
• 3. Sport, Exercise and the Public Schools Phenomenon
• 4. The Rise of the Physical Training Mistress
• 5. For the Sake of the Team: Hockey, Lacrosse and Cricket
• 6. Individual Sports: Lawn Tennis, Golf and Cycling
• 7. The Medical and Scientific Debate on Women's Sport
• 8. Women's Sport and Dress Reform
• 9. The Literature of Women's Sport
• 10. Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index