Challenging gendered boundaries

Challenging gendered boundaries. Not all the middle- and upper-class women were content to remain on the periphery of the action, sporting or otherwise.

As of 1848, a feminist movement had formalized at Seneca Falls, New York, and especially in the North, other movements such as abolitionism both encouraged women to be social agents and demonstrated that their reappearance in the public domain endangered neither their health nor that of the nation. Moreover, the dynamic events of mid-century, including the War between the States 1861-65 challenged the gender boundaries and expectations that had confined women to the domestic sphere for more than three generations. Challenge is the appropriate word here, for middle- and upper-class urban women both found and made opportunities in public society during and after the Civil War that drew from their long-defined practices in their domestic sphere.

Nursing and teaching were precisely such activities, but they were also ones that required additional training as well as sound constitutions.

Not surprisingly, then, some women demanded and received access to colleges, where they did as their brothers did they began to participate in some of the emerging modern sports whose social power was increasing in the aftermath of the Civil War and the technological and communication changes of the 1860s and 1870s. At private colleges such as Vassar in New York and Smith and Wellesley in Massachusetts, women students formed clubs to play baseball and, quickly, tennis, croquet, and archery.

College administrators and faculty responded, initially to the influx of women and their own fears about the negative impact of intellectual work on women students, with requirements for medical examinations, exercise and gymnastics regimens, and the gradual absorption of women s sport clubs. Outside of the colleges, post-war middle- and upper-class women were also moving to take advantage of the increasing array of modern sports.

Local gymnasiums, armories turned into playing areas, and a host of clubs that formed as men and women sought new forms of community provided urban and townswomen with opportunities for a range of sports, from skating and rowing to trap shooting and tennis. Such activities continued to stretch the bounds of activity acceptable for and to women. They also quieted some of the fears held especially by the male-dominated medical profession about the negative effects that physical movement in sports might have on women s biology and reproductive functions.

An even more significant challenge to the nearly century-old ideology that placed women in the home and in subservience to men came in the form of a machine, the bicycle. Invented in Europe in the early 19th century, early versions of the bicycle had appeared in various forms and had become the object of short-lived fads through the 1860s. Then came the invention of the ordinary one large and one small wheel and, subsequently, the safety cycle, and the latter especially appealed to women.

Bicycle riding, and even some racing, became popular, and the practice afforded women with a means of physical mobility and freedom that they had not known for generations, since the days when horse ownership was common and expected, even by women. Significantly, as well, the bicycle catalyzed dress reform. Bloomers and knickerbockers went on, and corsets came off. The day of the new woman was about to dawn 13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org . 2.4.4.