Women in Sport Conference
The chosen theme was ‘Women in Sport’ and we offered attending delegates access to a varied programme of physical and virtual presentations across the day.
The Keynote Lecture ‘“All work and no play makes a dull wife and a tired mother”: Women and Sport in Second World War Britain’ was delivered by Dr Rafaelle Nicholson (Bournemouth University) and Professor Matthew Taylor (De Montfort University).
Despite considerable progress over recent years, female participation in sport continues to be neglected by historians. This is as true in relation to histories of women, as histories of sport. It is especially evident in the context of the historiography of the British home front in the Second World War. The extensive literature on women in the Second World War has generally been silent on sport and leisure. This paper challenged assumptions that the war had little impact on the sporting lives of British women and highlights the importance of sport and leisure to women themselves, as well as to the government, military and civil defence authorities. Because women were an important part of the home front, their morale, welfare and physical fitness mattered to those in authority. But the impetus for an extension of women’s sport also came from the women themselves, who pressed for the space and the opportunities to participate in sporting activity and extend the boundaries of women’s sport to a degree that had seemed impossible between the wars.
Further papers considered a wide variety of women’s sporting participation through national and international examples, in a variety of historical periods. Topics included football, basketball, rugby, hockey, running, a strength athlete, speedway and women’s sport organisations and education.
*This event was part-funded by the British Society of Sports History (BSSH)
Full provisional programme