ABSTRACT
Probably one of the most vivid images of female emancipation at the turn of the century – one that recurred then in the illustrated journals and lodged itself in the popular mind – was that of the New Woman engaging in sport. The lady cyclists, the lady swimmers, the lady cricketers, the lady golfers, the ladies with hockey sticks, rackets, even footballs, seemed to embody the spirit then abroad that was driving women (some women, at least) to gain admittance to the world of men. ‘Let our women remain women instead of entering into this insane rivalry with men,’ wrote one critic in the 1870s. 1 Such voices grew shriller as time went on, under the influence of eugenist ideas and the concern with race perfection which marked the new century. Women, in the view of the eugenist doctor, Arabella Kenealy, in 1899, stood in danger of neutering themselves by over-indulgence in athletics. The sinews of games-playing schoolgirls repelled her. ‘Stigmata of abnormal Sex-transformation’ she called them later, likening their development to that of male antlers in female deer; 2 and she arraigned the ‘muscular reformer’ who ‘sees as woman's highest goal her capacity for doing things that men do’. 3
