EVOLUTION OF SPORTS: FEMALE TRADITION

Abstract

For a long time women played no more than a marginal role in the Olympic movement. Even in 1992 women represented less than 30% of the competitors at the Summer Olympic Games. On their way to Olympia women were faced with a great number of obstacles. The opposition which they met was directed at not only women’s participation in sport but also the maszculinization that this was alleged to produce as well as the ‘emancipation’ of women and the perceived threat of change in the gender order itself. In an age when the ideals, duties and roles of the two sexes in everyday life were being radically transformed by processes of modernization, it was hoped that sport and the Olympic Games might contribute towards upholding the myth of the male as the ‘stronger sex’. In the 19th century, women, like the ovens they cooked on, belonged in the home and not on the sports ground. This was true of both Europe and the USA. It lay ‘in the nature of things’ that girls should be excluded from the first initiatives and concepts of physical education which, like German Turnen or Swedish gymnastics, began to appear in the early 19th century. Girls and Women, for example, were not allowed on the first German Turnen grounds opened in 1811 in a Berlin park known as Hasenheide; they could only admire the feats of the Turner from the perimeter. Modern sport of English origin was, in its early phase, also an exclusively male domain. Although physical exertion and competition were held to be contrary to a woman’s nature, by the end of the 19th century a few women did take part in bicycle racing, swimming contests and even in parachuting or ski jumping, much to the horror of the public.