BOOK REVIEWS

Gender and Sport

J. A. Mangan, ed., Making European Masculinities: Sport, Europe, Gender,
The European Sports History Review, vol. 2, 2000. pp. 2 0 1 . Abstracts,
selected bibliography, index. US$35.00 pb.

J. A. Mangan and Fan Hong, eds., Freeing the Female Body: Inspirational
Icons. London: Frank Cass, 2001. pp. x, 267, Select bibliography, index. US
$24.50 pb.

Sherrie Innes, Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular
Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. pp. viii, 228.
Bibliographic references, index. US$19.95.

The study of the body is an obvious starting point for historical and
contemporary investigations into Western culture and society. But an
intellectual bias in Western culture against the study of sport, and thus
sporting bodies, has until recently been prevalent. Because sport is a physical
rather than mental activity, it has been viewed as a lower form of culture and
unworthy of serious attention. However, there has been a recent surge in
interest in examining how sport maintains, shapes and transmits bodily
images and moral values. As Fan Hong points out, the body in sport, and the
female body in particular, is a location for debate about the changing nature of
ideology, power, social structures and cultural systems.
The three books contribute to a growing collection of scholarship on
gender and sport and illustrate the importance of the body in sport. Making
European Masculinities is a collection of essays about modern masculinities.
It explores the relationship between sport and the development of European
male identity. A wide range of topics, including ephebia in the Ancient Hellenic
world, fighting bulls in southern European culture, Victorian field sports, and
Ling and Danish gymnastics are tackled. As the editor J. A. Mangan explains,
the central thread of these chapters is 'the fitness of the male - physical,
moral, social and political - for confrontation with enemies, temptations and
circumstances. The fundamental concept of masculinity, whatever
sophisticated subsidiary concepts there have been, has changed little' (p. 1).
Evangelos Albanidis explains that the ephebia, schools providing
military, gymnastic and intellectual education for young men from 335 century
BC, 'had a crucial role in the making of Hellenic masculinity'. The original aim
of the Athenian ephebia was the formation of a soldier, but they did far more.
They ensured that male youth grew into men who embodied socially valued
qualities such as courage, endurance, orderliness, diligence, obedience and
the physical fitness required for war. Masculine virtues valued in the Hellenic
period have continued apace. During the nineteenth century, field sports and
team games privileged such qualities, and thus helped to shape the elite

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masculinity of this period. J. A. Mangan and Callum McKenzie explain that in

the late nineteenth century the two means of making masculinity in the public
school system, field sports (hunting) and team games (football), co-existed,
enabling students to display an unquestionable masculinity to their peers.
Gymnastics also acted as a masculinity rite in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, as Jens Ljunggren and Hans Bonde illustrate. Swedish
Ling gymnastics evolved as an attempt to resolve some of the masculine
problems with modernity, such as men's decreasing strength and their fading
identities as warriors. Ling gymnastics was a synthesis of the traditional and
the modern, and was designed to resolve a complex of problems in the first
half of the nineteenth century. Danish Ollerup gymnastics was a rite of
passage and a feature of the ritual development of masculinity in Denmark
between the wars. Bonde notes that Ollerup gymnastics 'became a national
symbol of masculine power', and 'to the Danish public, became synonymous
with a masculine, physical universe' (p. 152). The qualities valued in these
masculinity-making practices worked to justify beliefs about femininity and
masculinity and their female and male bodies. The latter should be strong and
dominant, the former weak, passive, and fragile. While this has, and is,
changing to a certain extent, Mangan cautions that 'whilst change in history is
not to be foolishly overlooked, continuity in history is not to be naively
overlooked!' (p. 3).
Freeing the Female Body is a collection of essays concerned with
women who devoted their lives to the cause of women's physical liberation. It
'sets out to explore how some women in modern times have influenced and
determined the status of many modern women' (p. 237). Freeing the Female
Body examines the contributions of intellectuals such as Qiu Jin, a Chinese
feminist warrior and revolutionary, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 'one of the
"new women" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' who
struggled to extend the parameters of their physical abilities within a
patriarchal tradition of female confinement and subordination. The book also
contains essays on the lives of individual athletes, including Tesbsonda
'Ondina' Valla (an icon of fascist femininity), Maria Lenk (the Brazilian
swimmer who in the 1930s challenged the ideological view that a woman's
place was in the home), and Nellie Kleinsmidt (a South African karate star).
Freeing the Female Body connects sport and women's emancipation.
Many of the women featured believed that if women were to fight for equality,
then they must be physically strong. In 1905, as Fan Hong explains, Qiu Jin
believed that in order for Chinese women to reform the country, they must
have 'active minds and bodies' and accept their 'responsibility' for solving
China's crisis by force if necessary (p. 43). The subject of Gertrud Pfister's
essay is Alice Profe, a German emancipationist, who 'spent her life
advocating and promoting physical exercise for girls' (p. 99). Profe challenged
many of the unproven assumptions of doctors who believed, for example, that
sporting activity caused women's wombs' to dislodge. Profe argued that
"'female weakness" was caused by a great number of interdependent factors
such as education and upbringing, unnatural beauty ideals, the neglect of the

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body and even restrictive clothes' (p. 108). Mangan and Hong's implicit
message is that women who want to achieve emancipation have to fight hard,
discard the trappings of traditional femininity, and confront criticism and
hostility from both men and women.
Sherrie Innes' Tough Girls examines the increasing prevalence of
tough girls in the popular media over the last three decades. Innes explores
many facets of popular culture for their depictions of tough girls. The 'cult of
femininity' in women's magazines, for example, undermines women's
toughness by emphasizing the notion that toughness is sexy, and that tough
actions and appearance do not diminish a woman's sexual availability and
physical appearance. Thus as tough as a woman might appear, she must be
model-beautiful and slender. She might wear a leather jacket, but she should
wear it with a frilly blouse, while posing with a man. Innes makes positive
comments about the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. Innes explains
that Xena shows her audience that it is possible for a woman to be strong and
heroic and that she does not need a man to come to her rescue. Yet,
although 'the tough girl might help to radicalize how women view
femininity, . . . she is still very much an outsider in a culture that assumes
that the smiling model on the cover of Ladies Home Journal is somehow a
more "normal" woman than Xena or Ripley'. It is 'an assumption that binds
women to the cult of femininity and separates them from authority and
power' (p. 181).
Common threads and lessons run through the three publications.
Firstly, they illustrate that explicit displays of gender identity were historically
accepted as the norm; men dominated the public sphere and women were
confined to the private sphere. These two spheres caused specific and limited
gender identities. By exploring bodies, and the practices that work on them,
and the meanings applied to them over time, the hidden nature of gender
construction can be exposed and explored. Sherrie Innes, for example,
illustrates that while representations of tough women in the media appear to
be evidence of loosening gender roles, the tough women's femininity is still
emphasized: they are dressed in sexually provocative clothes, they are
always weaker than the toughest man, they invariably crack under pressure,
and often are distracted by their love for a man.
Secondly, the three works provide examples of historical continuities
and discontinuities. Making European Masculinities illustrates that from
Ancient Hellenic times to at least the mid-twentieth century, the qualities
valued in men included courage, strength, restraint, self-discipline and
industry. Freeing the Female Body, as an overview of some inspirational
icons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presents the optimistic idea
that these and other women, have changed the lives of many others. But as
Tough Girls illustrates, there has been little absolute change in the
representations and expectations of Western women. They can be tough, but
must retain a certain amount of vulnerability and femininity. The bride who
can carry her groom across the threshold is a good is example: she remains
a figure of comedy, not romance.

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Other themes in these publications, especially Freeing the Female Body

and Tough Girls, include the notion that women have to be 'tough' to succeed
in a man's world, that is, to be taken more seriously by men to further their
own causes, or behave differently from 'normal' (read feminine) women and
get away with it Only through determination and bravery could the women in
Freeing the Female Body begin to challenge and overcome convention,
custom and prejudice in their quest to free women from the ranks of the
sexualized, controlled and oppressed. Making European Masculinities also
contributes to this idea, by showing the covert and overt ways that masculinity
and power have usually been embodied by men, not women. For example, as
Remi Dalisson shows in his case study of nineteenth century French fetes,
'prior to the gradual inclusion of women...sport was widely viewed as a male
activity, with the role of inculcating and underlining masculine values, serving
as an affirmation of masculinity, and reinforcing the segregation of the sexes
to the advantage of men' (p. 190).
The material in these three publications is complementary. The books
will be useful to students of gender, sports or media studies. Additionally, they
will interest social and sport historians, as they provoke thoughts about
aspects of gender role development and breakdown. Those interested in
women's emancipation over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be
one, but not the only, group of potential readers of Freeing the Female Body.
Similarly, those studying sport and masculinity would benefit from reading
Making European Masculinities, but it would equally appeal to those
concerned with sport history or feminism. Tough Girls contributes to the small
body of literature that studies tough women and will appeal to anyone
interested in the representation of women in the media. Innes believes that it
is helpful to reflect on the construction of the tough girl because she tells us
much about changing gender identities. Innes stresses that 'we need to reflect
on the many ways that toughness is used in politics, athletics, business, and
the military, to maintain the gender status quo by suggesting the essential
toughness of men and the essential lack of toughness of women' (p. 10).
Most of the essays in both Freeing the Female Body and Making
European Masculinities are narratives. While narratives provide fascinating
reading, they tend to obscure alternative representations. The intention of
these two volumes may have been to present the essays in this way, but it
means that some of the authors have not recognized or noted the
contradictions in their particular viewpoints. Scholarly legitimacy is increased
when an author recognizes that their essay is based on their interpretation of
the available evidence. For example, Gertrud Pfister says 'from these small
pieces the mosaic of the life and work of Alice Profe can be reconstructed only
fragmentarily' (p. 100). Some authors in Making European Masculinities
present their evidence as a form of advocacy, which is commendable,
because this acknowledges the author's subjective interpretation. For
example, Mangan and McKenzie note that their chapter 'considers the
evolving relationship between masculinity, field sports and elite education
during the nineteenth century' (p. 62). Similarly, Jens Ljunggren indicates his

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main argument as being that 'Ling gymnastics evolved as an attmept to

resolve some of the masculine problems with modernity' (p. 87).
Freeing the Female Body and Making European Masculinities consist
of historically based essays, and do not appear to draw on any theoretical
works. Innes, on the other hand, draws on a variety of feminist theorists
including Judith Butler, Susan Bordo and Sandra Bartky to inform her ideas
and provide background to her conclusions and findings. These are
particularly useful because they validate Innes' findings, illustrating why we
must challenge the notion that there is a 'natural' connection between women
and femininity and between masculinity and men.
These three publications contain interesting and varied material. They
will provoke more exploration of the complex issues surrounding sport,
masculinity, femininity and the body.

Alison Bradshaw
University of Otago

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