New Sporting Woman – A New Ideal of Womanhood in Late Victorian England?

Summary

Scholarship on the history of British sport has been enriched in the last two decades by a number of works on women's participation in sport in the Victorian and Edwardian period. Research by such scholars as Jennifer Hargreaves, Kathleen McCrone, Catriona Parratt and James Anthony Mangan pushed back our knowledge on the issue of female sport in the period. Their excellent works inform us about the nature and extent of women's sporting activity, the development of physical education in girls’ schools and colleges as well as the attitudes of medical profession to women's involvement in sport. Yet, there is still a lot to be uncovered. One of the fundamental obstacles any researcher comes across is the scarcity of sources related to female sport, such as memoirs, letters, autobiographies or club records. Therefore, this work will address the problem of public attitude to women's participation in sport and how sport helped to change the perception of women in society by having recourse to articles and opinions published in the press of the period.

English industrial capitalism of the 19^th century with the attendant economic and social transformations gave rise to the emergence of a paternalistic bourgeois culture whose dominant ideology was based on family cult and a belief in biological determinism. The central notion in this ideology was the concept of separate spheres occupied by men and women. In Victorian androcentric culture gender roles in society and mutual obligations of the sexes were strictly defined, with women being consigned to the private and the domestic and men assigned a vital role in the public and economic spheres (Burstyn 1980: 131). The relegation of women to the role of the housekeeper and a child-bearer was reinforced by religious and scientific arguments and assumptions about women's biological, psychological and moral characteristics making them inferior to men (Hargreaves 2006: 130). It was believed that women were innately predisposed to be wives and mothers and little else. As Jennifer Hargreaves maintains, the assumption of their physical inferiority was a chief argument justifying “maternity as the ‘highest function’ of womanhood – essential to the healthy progress of the nation” (131).

In consequence, by the 1830s, the ideal of the upper- and middle- class woman emerged.