ABSTRACT
Much of the rhetoric about the promotion of physical exercise and the subsequent development of physical education curricula for girls and women during the nineteenth century has portrayed the emerging popularity of female exercise and sport as a victory of feminist effort and scientific rationality over the tyrannies of fashion, sensuality, male dominance, and ignorant neglect about health matters. What is important, notes Howell in tracing the history of women's sport, ‘is that the rise, one might exaggerate and say the emancipation, of womankind went hand in hand with the growth of physical education for girls and women’. 1
