Sport, gender and society in a transatlantic Victorian perspective.

UNITED States; UNITED Kingdom

Following the America Civil War (1861-1865) organized sport became a major vehicle for defining and acting out gender roles. This was especially so with regard to the middle class - a considerably broader category than was the case in Great Britain, the nation from which Americans derived many of their sporting practices. Much of what Americans read also was either of English origin or patterned after that country's journals and books. Tom Brown's Schooldays sold more copies than any book except Little Dorrit in 1858, and as late as 1893 David Copperfield, Jane Eyre and Charles Kingsley's Hypatia were among the 25 novels most frequently circulated by major American libraries. Many British authors who had visited the United States were of the opinion that the reason that American men paid their women 'exaggerated chivalry' was to compensate for the fact that 'the female was not granted equality' in a nation that boasted of being egalitarian. This lack of equality deeply troubled leaders of the American 'woman's rights movement', no one more than the resolute Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1850 declared 'the girl should have all the freedom of the boy, in romping, swimming, climbing and playing ball'. Following an 1859 cricket match with a visiting English team Harper's Weekly asserted that 'the importance of athletic exercises is only beginning to be understood'. By the 1890s, however, male athletes were well on their way to making America the world's leading sporting nation. Their penchant for professional coaches evoked criticisms from English sportsmen as well as American college presidents. American females also benefited from the growing interest in athletic sports, although with few exceptions their participation was meagre compared to that available to males. Tennis, golf, and bicycling, sports that were deemed most appropriate for 'the ladies', were imported from England, as was field hockey, a vigorous game that was played mostly at private women's colleges and in settings that drew upon these contexts. Netball (derived from basketball) was one of the few contributions that the United States made to women's sports in Britain. Whereas athletic sports for males became a very public affair, with the exception of tennis, golf, and in certain instances swimming and ice skating, athletic sports for middle-class American females remained substantially, but not exclusively, a cloistered affair until the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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