Carly Adams
University of Lethbridge
Français
At the turn of the 20th century in London, Ontario community sport initiatives came as a response to increasing industrialization, urban expansion, and growing commercial distractions, which prompted middle-class reformers to campaign for urban parks and supervised playgrounds to provide children with ‘respectable’ amusements (Hall, 2002). Through their participation in playgrounds and city sport leagues, girls and women challenged notions of gender and female physicality, while exploring recreational activities, building lasting friendships and learning new physical skills—an experience that for many set the groundwork for decades of community sport involvement.
Emphasizing the notion that all historical sources are inextricably linked to social power, this study weaves together oral accounts, newspaper reports, pictorial depictions of sport, and available archival materials while simultaneously considering not only what information these sources provide but also how the information is delivered and the variety of meanings embedded in each source. Evidence presented in this study suggests that women’s sport during the first half of the twentieth century was a unique social space for women. It was certainly more than a voyeuristic form of entertainment for male spectators (Lenskyj, 1996; Lenskyj, 1989). The municipal playgrounds and industrial diamonds, for example, were physically empowering spaces where the athletic skills and abilities of girls and women were practiced, developed, and celebrated.
Exploring both geographical and relational notions of community, this study positions individual, everyday experience as central to our understandings of interactions between work, play, and social life. Investigating municipal playground programs, women’s industrial softball leagues, the London Girls’ Softball and Basketball leagues, and the London Supremes women’s fastball team, this study explores the construction of historical memory, asking why and how women explain, rationalize, make sense of, and apply meaning to their life experiences within specific social and cultural contexts (Sangster, 1997). The complexities of these experiences ultimately impact and shape how we come to understand and theorize women’s sport involvement of the past and the impacts it has on future policies and practices.
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