ABSTRACT
THE TITLE OF DAVID LOWENTHAL’S classic historiographical text, The Pastis a Foreign Country offers historians a useful reminder that studying by-gone eras and elapsed conditions, and what differentiates them from the present, involves questions of social change.1 Indeed, comparing past and present conditions and circumstances, placing aspects of the past and present in their respective contexts, or examining the causes of change is both implicit and explicit in the very term history. Pamela Grundy illustrates this well in the following short narrative about the emergence of the modern sportswoman:
During the first part of the nineteenth century, argued Smith College instructor and women’s basketball advocate Senda Berenson, ‘the so-called ideal woman was a small brained damsel who prided herself on her delicate health, who thought fainting interesting, and hysterics fascinating.’ But by 1901 an article appearing in the Salisbury Daily Sun … could announce, ‘The old maid has … disappeared completely, and in her place we have the breezy independent, up to date, athletic and well gowned bachelor girl, who is succeeding in business life or a profession and asks neither pity nor favors from her fellow men.’2
