Women Horse Sports And Liberation

*Shortlisted for the 2022 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize* This book is the first, full-length scholarly examination of British women’s involvement in equestrianism from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, as well as the corresponding transformations of gender, class, sport, and national identity in Britain and its Empire. It argues that women’s participation in horse sports transcended limitations of class and gender in Britain and highlights the democratic ethos that allowed anyone skilled enough to ride and hunt – from chimney-sweep to courtesan. Furthermore, women’s involvement in equestrianism reshaped ideals of race and reinforced imperial ideology at the zenith of the British Empire. Here, British women abandoned the sidesaddle – which they had been riding in for almost half a millennium – to ride astride like men, thus gaining complete equality on horseback. Yet female equestrians did not seek further emancipation in the form of political rights. This paradox – of achieving equality through sport but not through politics – shows how liberating sport was for women into the twentieth century. It brings into question what “emancipation” meant in practice to women in Britain from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. This is fascinating reading for scholars of sports history, women's history, British history, and imperial history, as well as those interested in the broader social, gendered, and political histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for all equestrian enthusiasts.

New things are forgotten old things - this rediscovery of the past is especially important in horsemanship and equestrian sports. Despite advances in sciences and technology, the physiologies and psychologies of the two principal agents, the equid and the human, have undergone relatively few changes since horse domestication. The studies collected in this volume outline such essential and recurring challenges in equestrianism as gender issues, equine identification, the use of hyperflexion and groundwork in training, as well as many others, from prehistory to this day.

This book discusses major discourses of performing sports within human rights. Research findings data demonstrate that sports is an inequitable field today that has the potential to be a social change agent. There is more discussion about rights violations and what the fields of sports can do to be more rights-respecting, but the discussions are at a surface, rather than analytic level for most sports organizations. In sports, culture and human rights, as an emerging field, it is important to develop well crafter theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical body of knowledge. There is an academic discipline of sport that showcases its interdisciplinary nature. Linking sport to the field of human rights will require theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical evolution in this new discipline. There are both organizational, environmental and individual factors associated within the nexus of sports, athletes and human rights. This book links together sports and human rights in a systematic and analytical way. It contains chapters that discuss human rights policies in performing sports, from both organizational and interpersonal perspectives. The book focuses on the benefits of sports and the human rights and safety challenges within the operations of sports organizations and their impact on individual players.

This book explores the historical development of coaching traditions across Europe, placing national approaches to coaching within their cultural and political context. Sports coaching is a social practice that has been shaped by its cultural context, resulting in different countries being characterized by different coaching traditions. By helping us to understand the history of coaching across Europe, this book allows us to better understand both the history of sport and the cultural and social history of Western European nations. Drawing on cutting-edge historical research by international scholars, the book presents studies of coaching cultures in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and the United Kingdom. It explores how sporting histories, cultural attitudes, and social contexts resulted in distinctive coaching heritages, which were further shaped through coach migration and the adoption of elements of other countries’ coaching structures. This book explores these phenomena to provide critical evidence of the historical impact of culture on the development of sports coaching. The book offers insight into the characteristics of European coaching traditions. It will be fascinating reading for academics in sports history, sports and coaching studies, gender studies, and transnational studies, as well as those with an interest in British or European history and social and cultural history.

This is the first book to focus on race, sport, protest, and the Black Atlantic. It brings together innovative scholarship on African, African-American, Afro-European, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Caribbean sports in a manner that speaks effectively to the diversity of the African diaspora, its history, and culture. The book explores the history of sports, including baseball, basketball, boxing, football, rugby, cricket, and track-and-field athletics to show athlete and fan protests in sport intersected with discourses of nationalism, self-fashioning, gender and masculinity, leisure and play, challenges of underdevelopment, and the idea of progress. It shows how sport in the African diaspora is a crucially important lens through which to understand the challenges, changes, and continuities of Black Atlantic history, the history of protest, and racism. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport history, social and cultural history, post-imperial history and decolonization, or the sociology of sport, race, and political protest.

Using the history of sport in the small towns and local communities of Poland, this book shines new light on the everyday reality of life under a communist regime in Eastern Europe in the 20th Century. The book shows how socio-cultural history – ‘history from below’ – that draws on rich sources including oral testimony, personal archives, and literary and visual material, can provide the missing piece in our understanding of a significant time and place in the contemporary history of Europe. Focusing on the period between 1945 and 1989, the book shows how sport was an important element of state politics and propaganda but looks closely at the local level – at the spaces and material culture of sport - to reveal the extent to which sport had penetrated the daily culture of rural and small-town life in Poland. The stories of football players, local clubs, small sports arenas, and cyclists who crossed geographical and culture boundaries, all add new depth to the history of contemporary Poland, and by examining the history of local sport organisations the book also reveals important differences between official state ideology, the provincial party apparatus, and the lives of ordinary people. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the history of sport, socio-cultural history, European history, the history of the 20th Century, or historical methods.

This book is the first academic all-island history of either rugby union or association football, two of the three most popular male sporting pastimes in Ireland, across the seven decades that followed the political partition of that country between 1920 and 1922. It moves beyond the occasionally simplistic explanations of the development of Irish sport that have focused on political and sectarian divisions, and goes deeper into the social, cultural and geographical dynamics of the island of Ireland to explain why certain people have played certain games in certain places. Drawing on historical and archival sources as well as cutting-edge geographical information systems, the book brings to life the spatial trends in each game’s administrative development and geographical distribution, that have not normally been a feature of many previous histories of Irish sport. The book also examines first-and-second-hand accounts of athletes and administrators involved in rugby and football during that period, to explore what it meant to represent a province or country at these crucial moments in Irish history and compares the Irish experience of both sports with experiences in other comparable countries. Shining important new light on the interactions between Irish rugby and football and the political, social, economic and cultural trends of Ireland in the twentieth century, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the history of sport, Ireland or the UK.

When women decided that they wanted to compete in horse sports as equals with men, it took courage and perseverance. The women on both sides of the Atlantic who fought to compete in the male-dominated sports of show jumping, dressage, eventing, and racing are the subject of "Equal to the Challenge." Jackie Burke interviewed many of these extraordinary women, and the book is richer for their simple, moving accounts of how they achieved their goals. Many had to endure rejection, humiliation, physical danger, and privation in order to take part in the horse sports they loved. Some women struggled doubly, since they had to overcome physical and financial handicaps. Young women and not just riders will find in this book worthy role models for our time. Jackie C. Burke is a journalist who has been involved in horse sports all her life and knows just about.