Women and traditional sports and games

Women and traditional sports and games. Women were far more visible in American sporting life across time than the portraits of them in many histories would suggest, and for no period is this statement more true than in the years before the mid-18th century.

About 1600, before Europeans colonized the land that would become the United States, the earliest American sportswomen were Native Americans whose style of life must be characterized as a traditional one in which sports and other displays of physical prowess were embedded in the rhythms and relations of ordinary life. Religious ceremonies, for example, called on women, and men, to dance for hours at a time, while rites of passage from maidenhood to womanhood included physical displays and tests.

Ball games occurred in the context of women s daily tasks, and the outcomes could affect one s place in the family or the village. Even equipment and items for wagering, which women often controlled, came from the material stores of wood, corn, shells, and animal hides that were used and valued in everyday life. The migration of colonists from Europe, especially Britain, and then Africa began shortly after 1600, and these people, too, fashioned a traditional, organic style of life in which sports were interspersed with ordinary tasks and rituals. Initially, women were few among the colonists, and not surprisingly, there were few opportunities for sports other than hunting and tavern games.

After mid-century, however, the gender ratio gradually evened out, and a critical mass of women were present to assume their traditional roles as workers in the fields and homes and as producers of community gatherings, fairs, and family events.

Some women owned the equipment with which settlers played games, especially card games. In rural areas where harvest festivals came to be fairly common, women prepared the food that the grain-cutters would consume during the post-harvest celebration. Then, too, villages and the emerging towns became the settings for diverse social practices. On warm summer days in New England, husbands and wives fished and sailed on the numerous waterways. Towns like Boston, Providence, and Hartford offered an even broader variety of sports and recreations, ranging from dances to races to fist fights.

By the early eighteenth century emerging cities were sites for public, commercial, and physical displays, including tightrope dancing by women and men. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the sporting experiences of women of European and African ancestries, as well as recent immigrants, were far more varied than they had been earlier. Enslaved African and African American women found some solace in their brief respites from work on Sundays, in the evenings, or in the days of celebrating made possible by the observance of holidays when they danced, played simple games, and ran races.

Agricultural fairs, initiated by white farmers, planters, and traders, also included contests, especially foot races, for black women who competed for articles of clothing. White farm women also made possible and engaged in an array of games, contests, and dancing at their rural festivals and family events such as weddings and funerals.

Occasionally as well, women in farming communities raced horses, even against men, and they were willing to wager on their skills. Middle- and upper-class women, especially those who either lived in or visited towns and cities, had access to the broadest range of sports and other recreations. In the South, white women who lived on plantations raced horses and went fox hunting. As did their northern contemporaries, they also attended balls, played cards, and attended the increasing array of physical culture exhibitions, which included race walking, tumbling and acrobatic displays, and equestrian shows 13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org . 2.4.2.