Women’s Sports in Quebec from 1920 to 1961

Elise Detellier -University of Montreal, DOCTORAL STIPEND 2006

Français

2009

My thesis focuses on women’s sports in Quebec from 1920 to 1961. Over this period, there was some democratization of sports practices in Canadian society, and a number of social stakeholders actively debated the topic, vying to impose their conception of sport.

Although Canadian historiography includes few studies on sports in Quebec, the province is
a particularly interesting case because of its linguistic duality, especially evident in Montreal, and of the considerable influence exerted by the Catholic Church on various aspects of social life, including sports. In my thesis I therefore focus on the social debates surrounding women’s sport in Quebec and the participation of Montreal’s Anglophone and Francophone women in sport, while investigating how this social discussion and practices affected each other.

In the first part, an analysis of the discourse of clergy members, physicians, physical education teachers and civil servants shows that although these stakeholders did not expressly oppose women’s participation in sports, they nevertheless restricted women’s access to sport by closely scrutinizing their practices. As elsewhere in Canada and the West, the worry that violent and physically demanding sports would alter maternal bodies, combined with the fear that women would be masculinized by playing sports, a field primarily associated with men and masculinity, made most social actors of the time very uneasy about women’s participation in sport.

For Francophone Canadians, these concerns were exacerbated by the strong nationalist movement and its fears, stronger than elsewhere in Canada, that women would abandon their roles as wives and mothers if they were more active in the public sphere, which included sports activities. In addition, church members’ misgivings about women’s bathing suits and shorts, two types of sportswear, also point to the difficulties faced by Canadian Francophone women in carving a place for themselves in the world of sports.

The second part of the thesis shows that in Montreal women’s sports developed primarily in the Anglophone part of the city. However, Francophone women still participated in sport,
for example in sports activities organized by Anglophone sportswomen or by the Palestre nationale, a mixed sports center geared to French Canadians founded in 1919 that offered women the opportunity to practice for instance basketball, volleyball and swimming.

This thesis also shows that in addition to gender, ethnicity and religion are factors that influenced people’s perceptions of women’s sports and the way they were practiced.

2008

Defined in historiography as a medium to shape male identity in modern societies, the sports that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries were aimed mostly at men and seemed to exclude women. Even so, starting in the 1920s women in Quebec and elsewhere in the West participated in sports, thereby challenging and modifying the developing model for sports. This model had to integrate women’s participation in sports while confirming that sport essentially represented a building block to masculinity. Women’s sports are therefore a medium for (re)producing and challenging gender roles and relations, and a rich area of study to better understand their evolution in the context of industrialized societies.

Although Anglo‑Saxon and French historiographies reveal an interest in exploring this issue, to date there have been few historical studies on women’s sports in Quebec. My current research should lift the veil on this aspect of the history of women in Quebec by looking at the conceptions of women’s sports circulated by the social stakeholders of the time who expressed their views, and at Montreal women’s successful participation in sports.

As preliminary findings, I am presenting an analysis of the views of Francophone physicians and the Catholic Church. This study shows that, for these social stakeholders, women’s participation in sports led to far more worry than encouragement. Through their prescriptive views on women’s sport practices, the Church and physicians conveyed a traditional model of femininity. I conclude that even though women modernize by adopting new cultural practices, such as sports, the feminine image they must portray remains essentially unchanged, which does not promote the development of women’s participation in sports.

 

2007

Sport in modern society represented an opportunity to shape the male identity until the turn of
the 20th century, when women challenged that definition by participating in sports. A sport
model must integrate women’s participation in sports while confirming that the sport essentially
represents a building block to masculinity. From this arises views of women in sport whereby
the practice is a marginal form of sport containing practices specifically adapted to women. As
gender is fundamental to understanding women in sports, it is the subject of my research project on the development of women’s involvement in sports in Montreal between 1920 and 1961.

Montreal is an interesting case study, because two major groups co-exist: French Catholics and
Anglo-Protestants. In both of these groups, elite male members essentially develop the views of women in sport to which certain practices are related. Although they do not conflict, these views and practices differ from one another, and show that in addition to gender, ethnicity and religion influence the way in which women in sport are regarded and the manner in which sports are practiced.

To analyze the evolution of women in sports in Montreal, I compare the views expressed by the
social stakeholders with the practice of sport by women. This approach provides a good
overview of the views conveyed regarding women in sport and an understanding of the extent to which women athletes’ concur with those views. The purpose of my research project is to show that, in order to understand the evolution of women in sport, it is necessary to compare the views expressed and current practices. Gender, ethnicity and religion influence how views are developed and practices are materialized.

SCRI 2007 Presentation Slides

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