ABSTRACT
The academic study of women’s sport emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the rise of social history, women’s history, and sport history. Early academic efforts were often ‘compensatory’ or ‘recuperative’ projects that entailed ‘adding female subjects to histories that did not include them’. Early works were often descriptive, progressive narratives that began with women’s ‘exclusion’ from and ‘controlled development’ in sport. Academics tended to focus on ‘women worthies’ or significant figures in institutionalized sport and physical education. A prospective athlete’s identity has often determined the opportunities available to her. Historians of twentieth-century women’s sport highlight the complex ways in which identities – particularly racial, ethnic, and classed – influence opportunities across the American continent. The importance of sport for twentieth-century women is clear throughout the Americas, as young athletic women in Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean, contested the norms of nation, gender, race, and colour, as several scholars have begun to document.
