A Contemporary History of Women's Sport, Part One

Sporting Women, 1850-1960

Jean Williams

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317746652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an historical survey of women's sport from 1850-1960. It looks at some of the more recent methodological approaches to writing sports history and raises questions about how the history of women's sport has so far been shaped by academic writers. Questions explored in this text include: What are the fresh perspectives and newly available sources for the historian of women's sport? How do these take forward established debates on women's place in sporting culture and what novel approaches do they suggest? How can our appreciation of fashion, travel, food and medical history be advanced by looking at women's involvement in sport? How can we use some of the current ideas and methodologies in the recent literature on the history and sociology of sport in order to look afresh at women's participation? Jean Williams's original research on these topics and more will be a useful resource for scholars in the fields of sports, women's studies, history and sociology.

1 Victorian Sporting Variety, Women’s Education and Writing

In these days of physical culture for women as well as for men, there is little need to dwell on the advantages of such exercise as the art of natation gives to the body, while every swimmer knows the glorious sensation of cutting through the briny waves, with the froth and foam curling round the head, and the magnificent feeling of freshness and strength which follows the judicious use of the sea bath. And what more interesting sight than that which can be seen now at so many of our seaside resorts, viz. a bevy of fair damsels, clad in pretty and appropriate costume, disporting themselves in Old Ocean, their rosy limbs flashing as they dash through the waves, their shouts of laughter resounding across the water and telling of blithesome happiness and abounding health.¹

Introduction: Women, Work and Sport

While women’s sport and leisure has most often been seen as providing recreation and consolation for the few from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, the examples used in this chapter suggest that the meanings derived from physical activities were multiple and diverse. The argument uses an industrial context to focus on different kinds of work, education, play and writing across a variety of leisure and sport. While there is a broad consensus that the expansion of modern sport and industrialisation were inherently related, Victorian female professional performers, sporting pedagogues, and writers are often overlooked in historical and social surveys. Mass participation can often be illuminated by individual case studies, or what theorists would call micro, rather than macro level, research. This chapter develops three sections along class lines to look in particular at working-class female swimmers, middle-class hockey players and upper-class field sports enthusiasts. Of these, swimming was a popular activity, hockey became more widespread across a growing middle class, while hunting, shooting and fishing had both elite and proletarian forms. Although the chapter is limited to these examples for reasons of space, the evidence suggests that sporting variety and its attendant commodification marked the period as a whole.

As the title of the seminal work by Sheila Rowbotham implied, until the mid 1970s both women’s work and leisure were part of a ‘hidden history’.² Much has since been written about women and industrialisation, but these texts often consider paid and unpaid employment as their main focus, rather than recreation. For instance, Britain’s growing number of family historians could refer to a list of 300 or so jobs encompassing ‘the range and diversity of women’s work spanning the last two centuries—from bumboat women and nail-makers to doctors and civil servants.’³ Readers would have found no athletes listed, either in a generalist or specific category, perhaps giving the impression that women working in sport-related roles was a twentieth-century innovation. This can also extend to academic surveys such as Deborah Simonton’s Women in European Culture and Society: Gender, Skill and Identity from 1700 in which sport has only five indexed references beginning with Suzanne Lenglen’s appearance at Wimbledon in 1919.⁴

These orthodoxies can shape the collection and organisation of historical material on women’s work and leisure. In a recently re-launched digitisation project, History to Herstory: Yorkshire Women’s lives online 1100 to the Present, a quick search for sport will yield no result from 80,000 archival pages.⁵ Rather than confirming that that there was nothing happening, the example reminds us that our present focus can sometimes shape the histories that we have. So broad generalisations should be treated with caution: gender could sometimes be perceived as less important in the exploitation of workers than class, religion or ethnicity. As the literature on the transformation of the nation-state between 1870 and 1914 indicates, the mass production of myths and manufactured traditions were themselves shifting social entities.⁶ Recent work has begun to look at what work and leisure might have meant in the context of specific industries and transport histories, including the railways and canals.⁷

What was considered civilised and respectable leisure could be dependent on circumstance. Pressure groups, like the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, formed in 1824, called for laws against ‘inhumane’ activities but were more focused on urban concerns, like bull baiting, than rural blood-sports and hunting.⁸ The ‘threshold of embarrassment’ in polite society therefore shifted unevenly.⁹ From 1831, the formation of the Lord’s Day Observance Society limited Sunday work, including that in the home. Monday often became ‘wash day’: for those women who had no facilities of their own, the wash-house became both a place of hard physical work, storytelling, smoking and drinking.¹⁰ The laundry grew between 1861 and 1901 to become the third largest employment sector for women and the second largest for those over the age of forty-five.¹¹ Along with employment in the laundry, textile, retail and clerical work comprised the main training opportunities for working-class women. They provided alternatives to ‘going into service’, which many dreaded because of the long hours, lack of privacy and poor status. However, the range of street hawkers, home-workers and sweat-shops make assessments of the overall numbers of women who were active in the labour market difficult. We know quite a lot about middle-class women working in the nursing and teaching professions in the nineteenth century but comparably little about working-class women in the cultural industries. This includes sports women, be they involved in earning a living as athletes for relatively short or longer periods of time.

Changes in the labour force affected women’s work up to 1914 in three key ways that were significant for sport and leisure. Firstly, women were classified with youths and children as workers in a range of industries while specific jobs became legislated as masculine.¹² Protective laws often infantilised women and, in practical terms, limited their opportunities for work. Occupational cultures around manual, technological and professional labour could become gendered, although individuals and groups challenged such divisions. Secondly, while the income of children and women was often vital to the household budget, public awareness also grew of the numbers facing destitution. Many single women supported themselves and, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, the Married Women’s Property Acts had liberalised divorce.¹³ The feminisation of poverty and the underpayment of female labour (individually and in occupational groups) tended to give women less access to public and private resources. Thirdly, obvious inequalities led to more collective organisation to ask for rights and freedoms. Men often supported these claims and combined with women in trades unions like the Blackburn Weavers’ Association, formed in 1854, and the National Union of Teachers, created in 1870. The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) was founded in 1859 and the Prudential Assurance Company formed by women clerks in 1871. Activists spread ideas in journals and pamphlets. A movement to increase the range of work available and to promote improvement in pay and conditions gradually gained moral legitimacy. However, these three overall trends should be viewed as dynamic and subject to regional, local or individual variation.

Women’s work was also affected by the changing concept of childhood. One summary has identified the four broad aspects of modern childhood as a move away from work to schooling (effectively turning children from economic assets into financial liabilities); declining birth-rates, which meant fewer children in families; reductions in infant mortality rates and an increasing willingness of the nation state to intervene in the health, education and protection of individuals.¹⁴ A historian of toys supports the general point that, though the wages of women and children were worse affected in times of slump, only 2% of boys and fewer girls aged between five and nine were at work by 1851.¹⁵ The percentage of children as part of the population increased and many may well also have worked outside school hours, so statistics are difficult to confirm. Hugh Cunningham suggests that, for young adults aged between ten and fourteen, the percentage of those who were considered gainfully employed was 36.6% for boys and 19.9% for girls.¹⁶ There seems to be a consensus that most children had some spare leisure in which to play, though the extent of domestic obligations obviously complicates the picture. The examples in the following chapter explore these transient patterns of life and its more long-lasting circumstances.

Just as no authoritative history of industrial Britain can ignore the place of women and children, the same two groups helped to shape occupational cultures. For many working-class girls childhood could be very short and work, from the age of six or seven, might range from scaring birds in rural areas, to bonnet-making in towns and tobacco spinning in cities. Among the more important studies to reveal conflicting attitudes towards childhood was the First Report on the Children’s Employment Commission in 1842. This concerned the hypocrisy in the way that boys, girls and women were represented and the conditions to which they were exposed at work in mines. The Second Report, published early the following year (though also dated 1842) covered trades and other manufacturing industries. Transcripts of interviews show work dominating most people’s lives but also give an insight into how free time was spent, such as a typical Saturday night in Wolverhampton.¹⁷

Following the 1847 Ten Hours Act and subsequent factory reforms, women were increasingly seen as a distinct class from men, as were children. Dame schools, run by women in their own home, and Ragged schools (usually established by charities or philanthropists to offer free education) provided poor children with a very basic education. By the time of the rise in mass-spectator sports, such as soccer and rugby in the late 1870s, the living standards, disposable incomes and educational opportunities of the working classes had generally risen and their working hours had been cut. But it was not until 1901 that children under twelve were prohibited from working in factories and workshops and it is telling that another digitised collection of material which looks at the work of the Waifs and Strays Society, from its foundation 1881 to the end of World War One, contains no reference to the social lives of its 22,500 children.¹⁸

Sport could be both an expression of popular culture and traditional past times: increasing evidence points to different types of female engagement, some of it a lucrative, if fragile, means of earning a living wage. By the later decades of the nineteenth century, the establishment of central governing bodies, codification of rules, national competitions, paying spectators and international audiences for sport changed dramatically. In an uneasy relationship with emergent governing bodies, sport had established itself as a form of commercialised entertainment in ways that still seem familiar. There were many links with other cultural industries. Well-known female swimmers, educationalists and field sports enthusiasts were part of this phenomenon. Unfortunately, there is not enough space to do justice to the adventurers, balloonists, cyclists, mountaineers, pedestrians, ‘stunt-girls’ (journalists who created their own record-breaking challenges), croquet, tennis or golf players who could just as easily have been used as examples here. The chapter does draw parallels with the entertainment industry more generally though. When women sports stars moved into the movie industry in the twentieth century, they followed others who had performed in theatres, music halls and circuses in the nineteenth century and before.

The section on swimming and the working-class female ‘natationist’ explores some of the direct and indirect ways that women earned a living from sport in the period. Local bodies, with gradually emerging national affiliations, were set up to organise competitions. The formation of the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) is a good example of how the creation of sports associations could change and regulate labour markets. After short-lived attempts to establish the National Swimming Association in the 1830s and the British Swimming Society in 1840s, the Metropolitan Swimming Club Association, founded in 1869, gradually came to use the word ‘amateur’ in its title and became the sole regulatory body for the sport in England.¹⁹ By the 1870s swimming was popular both with large numbers of participants and sizeable audiences on both sides of the Atlantic: 1,500 girls and women used the free public floating baths at Charles Street, New York in 1872 and 4,000 watched women’s races arranged by Kate Bennett at Fort Hamilton in 1874.²⁰ The English ASA had relatively little control of the sport until the mid 1880s, and consequently, a more relaxed attitude to professionals than some other codes. Similar attempts to form a Scottish national association in 1875 failed due to internal conflicts and insufficient funds in 1881. The range of female aquatic activity facilitated by individual working-class women and those active in trade networks was therefore significant and while this has received recent attention, much research remains to be developed on the subject.

The second section looks at how innovators of women’s education promoted sporting provision generally. As part of the re-evaluation of this topic, the achievements of physical educators are first set in the midst of wider discussions about access to tuition for women. This segment specifically covers the expansion of hockey as a ‘school sport.’ Access to further and higher education was important symbolically and practically as a means of female emancipation.²¹ Physical fitness for women was seen as a scientific topic with much surveillance and measurement, in the same way that women who entered higher education were endlessly weighed and measured in order to guard against ‘overstrain’. A number of Victorian women have been described as physical education ‘pioneers’ who created a profession after the establishment of Queen’s College in 1848. Some women were undoubtedly inspirational: Frances Mary Buss (1827–1894) had attended Queens College and founded the North London Collegiate School for Ladies in 1850.²² In 1858 Dorothea Beale (1831–1906) became Principal of the already extant Cheltenham Ladies College.²³ The headmistress who devoted herself to her life’s work subsequently became part of British popular culture, as the well-known rhyme indicates:

Miss Buss and Miss Beale,

Cupids darts do not feel,

How different from us,

Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

However, focusing on single women educators, headmistresses or patrons can overlook the enthusiasm of students themselves for sport and leisure. The case study of hockey suggests that particular activities...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Women and Sport or Women’s Sport?
• 1. Victorian Sporting Variety, Women’s Education and Writing
• 2. The Olympic Games, Popular Imperialism and the “Woman Question”
• 3. An Age of Speed
• 4. Football Interconnections and Olympic Parallels
• 5. “For the Most Part, the Team Was Given Private Hospitality of the Most Lavish Sort”: Women’s Hockey, Brooklands and Aspects of Empire
• 6. Women, Sport and Culture: From the 1948 London Olympic Games to Rome 1960
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Clubs Belonging to the All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) in the 1899–1900 Season and Their Colours
• Appendix 2: Dorothy Gwyn Jeffreys; Winifred Gwyn Jeffreys and Edith M. Thomson Hockey Jottings (unpublished: Kensington, London circa 1898)
• Appendix 3: Women’s Participation in the Modern Olympic Summer Games 1896–2004
• Appendix 4: Schedule of International Federation of Women’s Hockey Associations (IFWHA) Conferences 1930–1983
• Appendix 5: Scotland versus Ireland Programme 23 March 1935 at Glasgow High Schools’ Club Ground, Old Anniesland
• Appendix 6: Wales versus England Programme 10 March 1935 Merton Abbey, Wimbledon
• Appendix 7: South Africa National Women’s Hockey Team taken from the England versus South Africa Programme 28 November 1936 Merton Abbey, Wimbledon
• Appendix 8: The Brooklands Racing Careers of Some Prominent Women Drivers Between 1920–1938
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index