ABSTRACT
Scarcely more than a decade ago, professional historians paid scant attention to ‘sport’ as a topic worthy of inquiry. In consequence, as Richard Holt noted in his Sport and Modern French Society published as recently as 1981, ‘The histories of sport which have been written are not the works of historians but of popular journalists or important officials in the world of sport itself’.In general, their books ‘took the form of commentaries on record-breaking performances interspersed with anecdotes evoking the great days of a particular club or a famous sportsman’.Yet any serious social history of sport, Holt continued, has to analyse ‘the relationship between changing material and cultural circumstances on the one hand, and the transformation of physical recreation on the other’ - in short, how sport evolves in step with society. To add insult to injury, the few substantive studies by historians that we have are mostly concerned with men and their sports. If historical studies of men's sport and recreation were scarce before 1970, those dealing with women and their sports and recreations were virtually non-existent. Little existed apart from a few popular biographies of female athletes, relatively obscure dissertations about influential physical educationists, and highly specialized studies of specific physical education colleges or departments. There was nothing which could be considered a comprehensive study which examined women and sport within broad social, cultural, political, economic or intellectual contexts.
