Frank Cass Publishers

The International Journal of the History of Sport
ISSN: 0952-3367

The International Journal of the History of Sport is acknowledged as a leading journal in the field of the historical study of sport in its political, cultural, social, educational, economic, spiritual and aesthetic dimensions. The journal offers a forum to anthropologists, sociologists, historians and others who seek to explore the relationship between sport and society in a historical context.

Quarterly

Epilogue: Prospects for the New Millennium - Women, Emancipation and the Body
J.A. Mangan

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

This chapter traces the way in which Nellie Kleinsmidt, known as the Grandmother of karate in Africa, has negotiated discriminatory practices and overcome race and gender-related struggles, including the struggle to free the female body, in pursuit of empowerment. It explores her expectations and the constraints and frustrations she experienced, as well as the many contributions she has made to women's karate in South Africa. Nellie Kleinsmidt's karate career, which began in 1965, coincided with the early developments of South African karate. As a woman of colour her life and karate career were significantly shaped by apartheid legislation. It divided the country into areas of occupancy and residency according to race and was designed to prevent contact between the people of the government defined race groups. Black karate-kas were prohibited by law from practising karate in white designated areas. Lack of facilities and qualified instructors in areas allocated to Kleinsmidt's race group meant that she received very little formal karate instruction between 1966 and 1973. Soon after, she met Johan Roux, a white male. He was to become her chief karate instructor and life-long companion. They defied the apartheid legislation and in 1978 set up home together. They organized defiance campaigns, resisting the pressures from government to close their dojo because of its non-racial policies. Freeing her body at the broader political level involved the abolition of the race categories and all other apartheid legislation which impacted on her life choices and experiences. Initially this struggle and that of freeing her body occurred simultaneously. In her ongoing struggle against gender discrimination in the sport, t was in karate that Nellie Kleinsmidt could strive for the personal empowerment she sought. She could however not translate this into freedom in South African society itself. The impact of apartheid legislation together with the imposition of a sports moratorium by the South African Council on Sports (SACOS), negatively affected the growth of Nellie Kleinsmidt's karate career, yet she managed to obtain her sixth Dan Black Belt in 1998. This was a remarkable achievement given the constraints she had to overcome. In karate, Kleinsmidt was often viewed as a female first. The problem of female access is exacerbated by the overwhelming number of male instructors perpetuating the notion that the martial arts are inherently male sports. Accessing the various levels of karate has involved claiming physical and symbolic space on the dojo floor as well as involvement in the decision-making arenas of karate. In 1992 with the unification of karate in South Africa, Sensei Nellie began to extend her involvement with the refereeing arena and jointly established a Women's Karate Forum in her province. She has subsequently become a South African national referee and has earned the status of continental judge with the Union of African Karate Federation (UFAK). Nellie Kleinsmidt is the first and only woman of colour to have been appointed to the Referee's Board of South Africa and the only woman of colour in Africa to have obtained a sixth Dan Black belt.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

Maria Lenk is widely recognized as an exceptional athlete who participated in women's sport from around 1930 until 1950. In 1932, at the age of seventeen, she was the first woman to be included in a Latin American delegation to the Olympic Games. As a swimmer, she still sets world records at the age of eighty-four. This super-champion's sporting achievements and her persistent dedication to the advancement of sport still impress and surprise todays professional swimmers and researchers. Contextualised in the male-dominated society of Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter traces the achievement, and rise to international fame, of Maria Lenk. It examines the factors that enabled her to emerge not only as an important figure in sport but also as an icon of female emancipation in Brazilian and Latin American society. The focus is on Lenk's influence on the issues which affected the development of women's sport in Latin America. It also highlights the significance of Lenk's contribution to the changing place of women in Brazilian and South American society.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

This essay focuses on the second decade of the Italian Fascist regime through its emblematic symbol, Trebisonda 'Ondina' Valla. Valla gained first place in the 80 metre hurdles at the Berlin Olympics of 1936, and became the first world-class female athlete in Italian history, in spite of the generally backward condition of Italian women. In those years, a paternalistic and conservative society deeply discriminated against female participation in not only sport but also other cultural activities. The Catholic Church, medical expertise, eugenics theories and the fascist regime were all opposed to female competitive sport. The Church demanded female morality, modesty and domesticity while, the medical profession recommend only basic physical exercise for female health and motherhood. While promoting the myth of the New Italy as a modern nation, fascism wished it to be inhabited by a traditional womanhood. Paradoxically, however, Mussolini supported Valla because she epitomized a dynamic fascism and brought Italian Fascism international visibility. The serendipitous value of Valla was that she encouraged young women to attempt to force open the bars of their political cage, and at the same time forced the fascist ideology to reconsider and reconstruct fascist principles in the interest of international propaganda. Thus while Valla was a political instrument of fascist purpose, she was also an agent of female emancipation. She was a political icon that also became a gender icon. In both roles she became a symbol of congratulation but also of confrontation, contradiction and paradox.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

Alexandrine Gibb distinguished herself as an athlete, pioneering leader and administrator of women's sport, manager of several international athletic teams, and as Canada's most pre-eminent woman sports journalist of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet she has been almost forgotten by today's sports world, and certainly by the newspaper, the Toronto Star, where she worked for thirty years. Although this is her story, it is also an account of the early days of organizing women's sport in Canada, when Gibb and her contemporaries were major players. She fervently believed in 'girls sports run by girls', and in 1925 founded the Women's Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada, an organization she helped nurture until its demise in 1953. As manager, she took several Canadian women's track teams into international competition including the highly successful 'Matchless Six' at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. As a sportswriter and editor at the Toronto Daily Star, she wrote a lively and influential column called 'No Man's Land of Sport' until the Second World War, when she was reassigned to edit a section on women's war work. In 1935, Gibb was sent by her newspaper on a trip to the Soviet Union and through several Mediterranean countries to write a special series about women, sport, and daily life far away. After the war, she wrote mainly features at the Star. She was, for example, part of the press corps who accompanied Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh on a royal tour throughout Canada in 1951, but she never lost her interest in women's sport. In 1954, Gibb was primarily responsible for persuading sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Marilyn Bell, who at the time was comparatively unknown, to challenge the American Florence Chadwick in her attempt to swim lake Ontario. Gibb was one of the strongest advocates for women's sport Canada has ever seen. She never married, and in 1958 died at the age of sixty-six.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

It is argued here that Margaret Stansfeld, as Principal of Bedford Physical Training College from 1903 to 1945, succeeded in developing a strong and distinctive 'female tradition' which was widely disseminated by her students. She was realistic in recognizing the strength of opposition from a male-dominated society to women's participation in sport and physical exercise, and steadily overcame it. She achieved this partly by insisting on acceptably 'ladylike' behaviour from her students in conventional social situations, and also by bringing the work of the college into the public arena, through displays of gymnastics, through the use of elementary schools for part of the student teaching experience, through the running of a physiotherapy clinic where treatment was given free of charge, and through the use of students in the outpatients ward of the local hospital. Stansfeld herself was PE organiser for Bedford from 1923. But she was not afraid to fight against prejudice which was demonstrably based on false premises, e.g. medical opposition to women taking part in strenuous physical exercise, or to insist on appropriate clothing for women, however indecorous some might have considered it. The college's long term success resulted from a series of factors: its curriculum and ethos, the networking process it fostered, the quality of the teachers it produced, the strength of the Old Students' Association, Stansfeld's willingness to embrace new ideas, and the growing academic respectability of the subject. The pivot of the whole process was Stansfeld herself - autocratic, austere, but an inspirational teacher - feared and loved. Students who succeeded were empowered - 'She prepared us for LIFE!' The success of her Old Students was the most important feature, e.g. Phyllis Colson, originator and director of the Central Council of Physical Recreation. Hundreds of others, less well known, in schools all over Britain and abroad, gave their pupils pride in themselves, not only through the experience of games, gymnastics and dance, but through moral example - 'fair play' - and many brought the newest innovations into schools (e.g. Elizabeth Swallow was the first to introduce Laban into a maintained school in 1939). Her indomitable spirit was always in evidence, even at the end of her life - she returned to the office of Principal in 1948 at age 88, three years before her own death, after the unexpected death of her successor. It was this strength of will and character above all else which empowered her students as women and as teachers, and which enabled them in their turn to empower their own pupils, and so to replace the myth that physical activities were damaging to women with the growing realization that sport and physical recreation are as beneficial to women as they are to men. Stansfeld was justifiably recognized in her time as a pioneer in the advancement of women's PE , e.g. by the McNair Report (1942), which argued that nothing comparable had been achieved for men. She was the last survivor of the originators of women's PE, and the most influential. It is ironic that the rise of feminism in the second half of the century coincided with the dissipation of the female tradition, epitomised by Stansfeld, as physical education for women, developed by women, in the first half of the century increasingly came to be controlled by men in the second half. It is perhaps the ultimate demonstration of the success of Stansfeld's work that, despite this, at the beginning of the twenty-first century women are free to participate in and enjoy sport and physical leisure in a way that would have seemed impossible at the beginning of the twentieth.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

Alice Profé was the first female sport physician in Germany and she influenced ideas on female bodies and female sports for more than 40 years. Her dream to become a doctor could be realized only in Switzerland because women were not admitted to universities in Prussia before 1908. After her examination and her PhD she established herself as one of the first female doctors in Berlin in 1905 and she worked there until her death in 1946 as general practitioner and medical specialist for pediatrics and sport medicine. As an expert on the female body she was active in many committees and organizations. Alice Profé worked her whole life for the improvement of the situation of girls and women. The focus of her work was physical education and sport, and she was always active in different types of sports herself. Her first article on this topic was published in 1906. In the following years over and over again she 'took the floor' criticizing traditional stereotypes about women and the female body, demanding resources for the education of girls and women. Her efforts also helped to reduce anxieties about women in sport and to encourage women to participate in sport. In her articles and in her lectures she encouraged women to decide for themselves about their involvement in sport. She rejected all attempts to patronize female athletes and refused to accept their exclusion from many sports. Profé propagated ideas which were not popular and she never swam with the tide. In one obituary it is stated: 'you have never changed your ideas about life for material rewards or professional advancement. You stayed yourself'. Her ideas are relevant even today.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

H.G. Wells called her 'that unforgettable heroine'. But she was forgotten, most particularly in New Zealand, where she was banned from mention in the newspapers under the War Regulations for her 'safe sex' work during World War One - a very hypocritical move as it happened just as her work was officially taken on by the army.For this work she was dubbed the 'guardian angel of the ANZACs' by a French venereal disease specialist and awarded the Reconnaissance Française by the French. After the war she settled in London, marrying her long-time friend and wartime colleague, physical culturist Fred Hornibrook. Rout went on with her venereal disease prophylaxis campaign after the war. She also entered the birth control movement in the 1920s, playing a major role in the last big birth control court case, a role often attributed to Dora Russell, while Rout again is 'forgotten'. In her books, like the best selling Safe Marriage, a safe sex guide (which was banned in New Zealand), she encouraged women to own their own bodies and take responsibility for their own sexual health. She linked exercise and sex, arguing in books like Sex and Exercise, that exercise would enhance women's sex lives. She and Hornibrook, who wrote a best-selling book entitled The Culture of the Abdomen, presaging the current obsession with rocklike 'abs', made a pair, teaching fitness techniques, holding 'native dance' evenings, and being hailed as modern dance proponents. Rout also wrote books on vegetarianism, wholemeal cookery and Maori culture. The word most commonly used by people describing her throughout her life was 'energy'. She herself was very fit. But she did not fit in. Once her marriage to Hornibrook was over, in 1936, she returned to New Zealand, was rebuffed by former friends. She sailed for Rarotonga and died there, of a self-administered overdose of quinine that September. As she had remarked to H.G. Wells, 'It is a mixed blessing to be born too soon.' She anticipated many of the enthusiasms of our own time - in diet, in dance, in ideas about exercise and sexuality. But because she was so far ahead of her own time in her 'safe sex' campaign, she became persona non grata in her own country. With the advent of AIDS her contribution snaps into focus - and the AIDS clinic in the city of Christchurch where she used to live has been named after her.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the 'new women' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - one of a growing number of women who struggled to extend the parameters of their physical abilities within a patriarchal tradition of female confinement and subordination. An exceptional woman of considerable talent, she became a major intellectual force in turn-of-the-century America. As a result of her prolific writing and lecturing on her theory of the evolution of gender relations and women's need to become socially useful in the larger world of production, she became known worldwide as a feminist theorist and iconoclastic social critic. Of special interest to this edition of inspirational women who have contributed to the physical liberation of women's bodies are Gilman's actions and writings about female struggles for creative fulfilment and physical autonomy. Analyses of her feminist writings, fiction, poetry, diaries and autobiography all provide rich insights into her strivings for physical autonomy and intellectual freedom. They all reflect her life-long preoccupation with physical fitness and good health practices and her desire for unrestricted physical mobility as a critical component of emancipated womanhood. Of particular interest to feminists today is The Yellow Wallpaper, seen largely as a depiction of the consciously and unconsciously designed male chauvinistic medicine practices to which women were exposed. Gilman's haunting and passionate protest against the rest cure has become a modern feminist classic, a paradigm text for historians looking at the relation between gender roles, madness and creativity. In some respects, the emergence of Gilman as a 'new woman' can best be understood as her break-away from the accepted medical paradigm based on the Cartesian split of mind/body and her forging of a radically new mind/body concept as synergistic. Tragically, she was never able to achieve that liberation and finally ended her own life on 17 August 1935 as the ravages of breast cancer destroyed her future chances of physical emancipation. But her interest in physical fitness as a means to gain personal autonomy, and the emphasis she placed on physical mobility in her numerous fiction writings was a direct and enduring comment on the barriers blocking women from physical emancipation in the real world.

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

Issue 18.1 - Special Issue: Freeing the Female Body

This article is a synthesis of the research into the relationship between national identity and sport in Wales from the late nineteenth century until the present day. It explores how sport has been a central tenet in inventing, maintaining and projecting Welsh national identity within Britain. Sport has offered the people of Wales an evolving means of declaring its status as a distinct and equal constituent of the United Kingdom. Sport also illustrates how Wales is rooted deeply in a British popular culture. The sports involved in these processes are far more diverse than the popular conception of rugby union as the Welsh national sport suggests.

Issue 17.4

The game of calcio, performed in various Italian towns probably from the fifteenth century onwards, unites elements of modern football and rugby. Settimio Alessandro Salvini's Instruzione del modo del giuocare il calcio a i giovani nobili fiorentini, printed in Florence in 1719 and long regarded as lost or even unpublished, provides primarily technical advice on the game. But behind the rules it encourages the noble youth of Florence to revive the game by playing it beautifully according to the rules. For playing the game, by this time probably rarely performed, was to reinforce the virtues of the nobility as well as the honour of Florence, the city closely associated with calcio. Read in historical context, the book proves how sporting rules and ideology can go hand in hand.

Issue 17.4

Issue 17.4

This article is to provides a description of the development of sport and physical training in the late Victorian British Army, and shows how the nature and extent of these elements of the British Army's transformation are closely connected to many aspects of British military and imperial culture. It examines the language of military discourse and arguments within the Army and society in general over education and national image, which were all heavily influenced by the culture of athleticism of Britain's military and civilian elite.

Issue 17.4

This essay focuses on the changing relationships between soccer players and supporters in South Africa in the period between the National Party electoral victory on an apartheid platform in 1948 and the Soweto Uprising in 1976, uncovers an important aspect of the 'hidden history' of South African football. After outlining football's beginnings in southern Africa, the analysis turns to the case study of Orlando Pirates Football Club of Soweto and their most popular player in the 1950s and 1960s, Eric 'Scaramouche' Sono.

Issue 17.4

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

In the Olympic year, Australia is increasingly positioned as a 'clean' nation, interested more in the 'pure performance' of the amateur ideal than in professionalized sport, sentiments that are embodied in the environmental rhetoric of the bid, the hardline stance on performance enhancing drugs and the promotion of past and present 'wholesome' Aussie sporting heroes. This clean, green image symbolizes more than simply a return to the 'ideals' of Olympism, but rather is part of Australia's quest to 'return' to itself, to a mythical Australia, an idealistic nation caught in the imagined monocultural paradise of 1950s suburbia, exemplified in the memory of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. This chapter explores the links between the 2000 Olympics, sports history and national memory and the reinvention of an "Australia" founded on an idealized national sporting past.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

This essay examines the impact of postmodernism on Australian sport. We aim to show that sport has been transformed by the process of postmodernization. The process began in the late 1960s when Australian sport threw away many of its moralistic pretensions and repressive formality, and locked itself into the corporate world. By the 1990s a number of professional sport leagues had emerged as amateurism lost its snobbish appeal and sport went about building its commercial value. Corporate signage saturated the major venues, and players were marketed as celebrities. Excitement, speed, the 'quick grab', and sensory bombardment became the defining features of the spectator experience. Spectacular and dramatic contests became just as important as skill and aesthetic display. Fans increasingly narrowed their attention span, but were no longer bound by a parochial tribalism. They took on multiple identities that could shift from an elite European soccer team one week, to a suburban Brisbane rugby team the next. At the same time, branding and image making were used to re-position leagues and major events, and attract fans and corporate supporters. Moreover, the television programmer became the final arbiter on how the game should be scheduled and played. The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games convincingly demonstrates that Australian sport has become a chaotic mix of ancient ritual, traditional athletic contests, slickly marketed and customized leisure experiences, and ultra-professional sports that combine complex strategy with Hollywood-style showmanship.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

During the 1970s and 1980s New Zealand was the site of many social and political struggles centred on colonization, gender politics, economic and social policies, international relations and state power. The biggest protests focussed on sporting contact with South Africa and found full force during the 1981 Springbok rugby tour. This article considers the range of protest during this period and examines the reasons behind the priority given to the campaign against apartheid sport. It examines the significance of rugby in New Zealand, and shows how 1981 provided a focal point for social frustrations associated with broader social and political change.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Since the Second World War, the elite competition in Australian Rules football has undergone a transformation from a semi-professional, metropolitan concern, into a fully professional and thoroughly commercialized national league. In 1989 this process was reflected in the renaming of the competition from the Victorian Football League (VFL), to the Australian Football League (AFL). This chapter analyses these developments using a social-scientific framework of 'crisis'. Specifically, the League's post-war history is divided into four chronological periods, corresponding to four distinct 'crisis phases' - those of 'origin' (1946-63); 'manifestation' (1964-74); 'high-point' (1975-84); and (partial) 'resolution' (1985-99). The conclusion holds that, as these 'phases' have unfolded, the traditional primacy of the League's cultural role has been lost to economic imperatives and commercial pressures.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

The efforts of three prominent men, New Zealander Leonard Cuff, and Australians Richard Coombes and Edwin Flack, did much to foster the development of sport as a cultural identity in the Antipodes. Above all, they raised the awareness there of what has since become a paramount sporting festival, the Olympic Games. Richard Coombes, emigrated to Australia in 1886 and became influential as the editor of the Sydney-based weekly sporting periodical, The Referee. Leonard Cuff became an inaugural member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894 and was a founding member of the New Zealand Amateur Athletic Association (NZAAA). Edwin Flack became known as 'the Lion of Athens' at the Athens Olympics of 1896 and his success there had an significant influence on the Olympic Movement in Australia. These three men epitomize the amateurism, nationalism, imperialism and internationalism in Victorian and Edwardian sport in Australasia.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

This study traces the history of Australian Rules by examining the evolving multi-dimensional nature of the game. In particular, the diminution of the once inherent violence of the code is explained in the context of changing relationships between men and women, spectators and players, and sport and society. The observation is made that in an age where local cultural practices have been weakened in the face of globalization, it seems that Australian Rules football will continue to promote a strong sense of indigenous identity, a phenomenon that can only be understood within the historical context of the game's distinctive gender relations.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

By examining the mechanics of cricket broadcasting and the commercial imperatives that feed it, this essay explores the promises of modernity and the way in which cricket provided a national vehicle for the dissemination of its messages. Drawn by the lure of test match action, Australians purchased wireless sets and licences in ever larger numbers. Cricket became a modern game in the 1930s and helped to disseminate modernity; it became important in the creation of a rhetoric of technological progress, it became a commodity and was 'sold' like so many other things. It also highlighted the gender inequities in Australian society. In a sense the game became a symbol of modern life.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

This chapter considers the impact of Catholic Irish-Australians upon the emergence of an Australian sport culture. It discusses the notion that many of what are now considered definitively Australian attitudes and sporting values were in fact the upshot of the conflict dynamic between the Catholic Irish-Australians and the English-Australians. The interrelationship between urbanization, sectarianism, education, and class issues had a major influence upon the development of Australia's sporting culture. In all of this the conflict between the two largest migrant groups, the Irish Catholics and the English, and the resultant dynamics, was a critical element. In the colonial context sport provided a tap-root for the migrant peoples to establish their new lives and in Australia it became a central feature of the culture, and one that in many ways now defines Australia and its people.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Historians have documented uses of physical cultural practices by schools serving the wealthy and privileged in Australian society to construct the gendered identities of girls and boys. However, we know little about how these practices were carried out in government schools serving the masses. The focus of this paper is the coaisl construction and constitution of gendered bodies through the practices of school physical education between 1900 and 1950. A brief overview is provided of the concepts of physical culture and the social production of gender. These concepts are then located within a discussion of government schooling and the social regulation of children's bodies through physical training. Following this discussion, a number of syllabuses and texts are analysed. The texts contained for teachers key information on physical training and a narrative on the androgynous child who was to be constructed through a regime of formal physical training. The article concludes with a discussion of the demise of physical training and with it the narrative of the androgynous child, and their replacement with the explicitly gendered practices of sport-based physical education after the Second World War.

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Issue 17.2&3 - Special Issue: The Australasian World, Sport in Society

Issue 17.1

Issue 17.1

Issue 17.1

Issue 17.1

British withdrawal in 1928, occasioned by deep-seated differences of approach towards the control of the world's most popular sport, represented yet another chapter in the stormy relationship between British football and FIFA. However, subsequently, the four British associations often acted as if they were still members of the federation. Indeed, the 1930s, though often depicted as a period of non-relations, even hostility, between British football and FIFA, saw several often ignored examples of collaboration, which helped prepare the way for British football's return to FIFA soon after the end of the Second World War.

Issue 17.1

This article examines the origin of the international rivalry between the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York (USMA) and the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario (RMC). In order to understand the emergence of this long-standing hockey tradition (1923-99), the article places an emphasis on the influence of MacArthur and Macdonell during the formative years of the rivalry (1917-31). Both Macdonell at RMC and MacArthur at the USMA consciously developed a sporting ethic in their respective militaries.

Issue 17.1

This article is one attempt in the studies of the imperial form of adapted athleticism in Africa. It traces the principle agents of the diffusion in Tanganyika of this Victorian and Edwardian educational ideology and examines its influence on the social and cultural history of the country. It argues that, it was the middle-class colonial educationalists, more than anybody else, who were responsible for the introduction of this influential ideology through the medium of education. Educationalist Cecil Julian Tyndale-Biscoe is believed to have played a pioneering role in the dissemination of organized games in schools in the 1920s. In contemporary Tanzania a school is incomplete without a football field. Indisputably, football, is the number one game in the country, a constant reminder of British cultural imperialism and an accepted legacy of this imperialism.

Issue 17.1

This article examines basic aspects of the administration and organization of chariot-racing in the Great Hippodrome of Byzantine Constantinople. It will deal specifically with the sport of chariot-racing and its general organization. The article locates those who had responsibility for the programme of the games, the role of the emperors, the participation of the different spectator factions (demes) and the associated problem of the terminology used with regard to them.

Issue 17.1

Sport in the Victorian period has always been a matter of historiographic debate. In the 1970s the early academic historians of sport were generally agreed that during the first decades of the nineteenth century a once thriving sporting working-class culture declined through the impact of urban industrialization. More recently this view has been subjected to criticism, and it has been argued that by focusing too narrowly on the most brutal and turbulent working-class sports, the very different experience of other working-class sports, for which clear evidence of decline is either entirely lacking or less than conclusive, has been overlooked. This article argues that a similar narrowness of focus and an over-simplicity of analysis has characterized much of the historiography on middle-class sport covering the period from the 1850s to the late 1890s.

Issue 17.1

Fascism and the Fascist representation of the human body as an iconic symbol of militaristic romanticism had, and has, parallels in other cultures. This fact should engender a sensitivity to past, present and undoubtedly future use of the body in and beyond new 'fascisms', as a political icon, illustrating a perennial search for human invulnerability, safety and security. The imagery of the muscular male body is everywhere. Despite the fact that Fascism as a potent ideology appears dead, 'it could have a second coming in different forms'. As Roger Eatwell has observed, 'neo-fascism has been the province of nostalgics'. Prometheus may yet prove immortal.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

By the twentieth century the Emperor had become a sacred, omnipotent figurehead. As emperor he was expected to define the uniqueness and superiority of the 'Japanese race' - to this end he was deified. The result was the Emperor Cult. This essay is devoted to a discussion of the ideological indoctrination into a Japanese Fascist militaristic manhood which sacrificed itself willingly for the emperor, to the successful introduction of associated military training into the education system from the pre-Fascist period of the mid-1920s onwards and to an analysis of the recruitment and training of the Youth Volunteer Army for Pioneering Manchuria in the latter half of the 1930s - a case-study of Fascist socialization.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

Brazilian Fascism reveals a preoccupation with the aesthetic rather than militaristic. Fascism in Brazil was uniquely Brazilian - a mixture of modern European influences and local and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, the male physique was central to this Fascism, too. The various Fascist festivals were 'testimonials to the body's imperative in political life'. This essay shows that although a preoccupation with sport was common to all Brazilian Fascist groups, it was less an ideological preoccupation than an aesthetic enterprise reinforcing unity through the theatrical. Body and spectacle combined to fuse élite and mass into a totalitarian community.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

This essay explores the importance of the concept of masculinity to the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, arguing that it was central to both the philosophy and political activities of British Fascism. Although this was partly the result of the influence of German and Italian Fascism on the movement, the essay argues that the origins of British Fascist ideas about masculinity, the body and sport can be traced to the ideal of imperial manhood of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

A founder of gymnastics schools, Niels Bukh became one of the great sons of the Danish nation but was later branded as 'un-Danish'. This essay focuses on Bukh's political development in the year of the Nazi's seizure of power in Germany in 1933. The story of Niels Bukh became the story of the struggle waged over the symbolic meaning of his gymnastics. The lack of a fixed link between gymnastics as expression and the interpretations to which it gave rise meant that on the one hand Bukh's team gymnastics could embody the democratic spirit of rural culture, and on the other could exemplify the unity of the Germanic tribe - a symbol of the 'aryan race'.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

The study of Fascism in Bulgaria between 1920s and 1944 is given to different ideological interpretations, and the complex cultural, political and economic links with Germany and Italy. This essay explores the notion of the Superman as a dual metaphor for the Political athlete, and for the body as a Politicum in the form of three interrelated arguments. These concern the ideological preoccupation of Bulgaria's Fascist sport, its subjugation to and departures from German Fascist sports doctrine, and the socio-anthropological premises for the emergence of the Superman. It is argued that the ideology and practice of the Bulgarian variant of the Superman were inconsist, and in the main replicated 'mainstream Fascism'. However, Bulgaria's Fascist sports ideology and practice clearly embraced nationalism, chauvinism and violence in pursuit of policies and anti-Communism, and the state introduced patterns of development which continued into the Communist period after 1945.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

Contemporary Austrian gymnasts still believe in the possibility of pure body culture, existing in a vacuum, far removed from the influences of day-to-day politics. In order to decode the metaphor of non-political body culture inherent in Austrian gymnastics it is necessary to consider the historical and ideological roots of the German gymnastics movement in Austria and investigate its collaboration with the Nazi movement in inter-war Austria. This was carried out in the name of the welfare of the greater German nation through the politicization of exercise in order to strengthen the male body in readiness for war. This essay investigates this ideology in its historical context and shows how it reflected gender and class characteristics and drew on Darwinian theory.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

The title of this second volume dealing with the male body in the iconography of Fascism reflects, of course, an ambition rather than an achievement. The supremacy of the Global Fascist Superman never became a reality but was certainly an intention. Superman Supreme explores the use of the image of the male body for this purpose in European, American and Asian Fascism of varying degrees and various interpretations, and the differences and similarities involved. Among the similarities is the fact that sport in all the cases in this volume was at the centre of the induction of the male body (and mind) into martial self-sacrifice. Sport was an important part of Fascist socialization. The reasons are not hard to find. Sport develops muscle and muscle is equated with power - literally and metaphorically. War, the essence of Fascism, demands physical fitness and sport helps promote this fitness. Competitive sport can help develop attitudes of aggression and aggression is essential in war.

Issue 16.4 - Special Issue: Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Global Facism

Issue 16.3

Issue 16.3

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Issue 16.3

Amateur sport heroes have long been courted to endorse recreational equipment. As the first product for mass-consumption to emerge from sport and recreation, the bicycle was subject to pioneering promotional activities, especially during a market slump in the late 1890s. Notable cyclists were approached to recommend equipment. In Australia, campaigns to broaden the use of bicycles at the expense of horses included the sponsorship of cross-continental cycling adventures. Dunlop, the tyre manufacture, was a pioneer in negotiating a strategy that kept up appearances of amateurism, and meshed with Australian concepts of manhood. However, it first met with comical disasters as it sought the right promotional formula.

Issue 16.3

This article traces the evolution of roller-skating from its origins until the First World War. The first recorded attempt to market the idea of ice-less skating on a skating-rink was made around 1720, the first recorded use of roller-skates on stage about two decades later. In the mid-1870s and the early twentieth century there were short-lived roller-skating booms in Europe. The article concludes that the craze was weaker in Austria than in England, France or the German Empire.

Issue 16.3

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was one of the most extraordinary political and social upheavals of this century. It attempted to re-establish an ideological purity of Communism threatened by the revisionists and capitalists over the previous 18 years and to recreate pure Mao Zedong thought. This article examines, for the first time, the Cultural Revolution and sport in China in its social, cultural and political contexts. It discusses the relationship between the Revolution and sport; the development of the Chinese Communist sports ideology and practice, and the stimulation of women's sport. It concludes that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution played a significant role in shaping Communist sport in modern China.

Issue 16.3

This article draws upon evidence gathered primarily from the first two dictionaries published completely in the French language, Antoine Furetière's Le Dictionnaire universel (1690), and the French Academy's Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1694) to measure the impact of sports, ancient and modern, on the French language in the late seventeenth century. It discusses approximately 75 sports-related metaphors and figures of speech that were included in the dictionaries. A few of these phrases were based on terms from ancient sports, but most were derived from croquet, billiards, bowling, skittles and especially tennis. The dictionaries contained no terms or figures of speech connected with rural sports such as football. The surprisingly larger number of sports-related metaphors suggests a high level of sports knowledge and perhaps participation among the wealthy bourgeoisie and city-based aristocracy of late seventeenth-century France.

Issue 16.3

Early in his career, Joe DiMaggio, the star of the New York Yankees from 1936 through 1951, was derided by the national press as a lazy, unkempt Italian-American hero (with an emphasis on his Italian heritage) whose natural talent was the sole reason for his success. But DiMaggio's greatest triumph on the field coincided with the entry of the United States into the Second World War. America would not have a hero affiliated with a country with which it was about to go to war, so allusions to DiMaggio's heritage were dropped or curtailed. His image underwent a dramatic transformation - from ethnic sport hero to American mainstream cultural icon - during a critical time in United States history.

Issue 16.3

Whatever we think of war, we dream continually of martial heroes, project them inspirationally and present them continuously as civic icons. The warrior is central to the visible existence of the state - and interestingly, so incidentally and increasingly is sport. And the two, in the past, the present and the future have been, are, and will be inextricably entwined. Robert Kennedy once asserted that 'except for war, there is nothing in American life - nothing - which trains a boy better for life than sport'. Many would add 'and a girl' today. The 'playing fields', in one form or another, have always been the locations for preparation for the battlefield. And on both today are to be found variants of the Aryan Superman - in Democracies, of course, always a defender, never an aggressor but a continuing and permanent iconographic presentation - an image, gender-free, purified of its threats, dangers and immoralities, that powerfully engages the senses. The image is not that of Wild Man but Wonderman and Wonderwoman. The Malign Fascist Superman has been replaced by the Benign Superman and Superwoman of the Free World.

Issue 16.2

D.H. Lawrence's contempt for democracy, expressed in his letters as well as his fiction, is no secret. On the basis of his authoritarian politics and his irrational belief in 'blood knowledge', both of which are strikingly dramatized in his novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence can be considered a proponent of Fascism. Analysis of this strange novel of an imagined Mexican revolution demonstrates that Lawrence's view of the human body - or bodies - was integral to his political vision.

Issue 16.2

Kulturpolitik (cultural politics) was a central pillar of Nazi propaganda. It represented the totalitarian exploitation of mass culture. The arts together with mass communication were totally subjected to the protection of Fascist ideology in order to secure social control. The professionally produced culture of film, the leisure culture of 'Strength through Joy' (Kraft durch Freude) and splendid mass spectacles involving tournaments, trooping the colours, political and national festivals and theatrical events, were designed to meet the longings and desires of large parts of the population with imaginative and emotional 'Ersatz'. Under German Fascism festival and cult combined to project potent images of a super race characterized by the callous Nietzschean morality of the superman, fulfilled only by death, sanctioned by blood as the baptismal water of the Reich and symbolized by a perverted Utopian aestheticism of terrible persuasive power.

Issue 16.2

In the depiction of the male nude both Nationalist Socialist and Aryan Romantic attempted to transcend sensuality and to glorify superiority. Fascism was puritanical. It was preoccupied with the nude male as a representational icon of political power. The strong body signified the strong state. Aryan Fascism represented an aggressive nationalism based on a militant masculinity expressed symbolically through images of the naked muscular male body. This preoccupation with the male physique was racial. Perfection of the male body symbolized perfection of mind and soul and represented racial superiority reflected in political supremacy. The muscular male body represented political will, power and dominance. However, until the Third Reich, the 'male body had never before been elevated so self-consciously, into a central political symbol'. Its adoption was the outcome of Greek inspiration, Aryan romanticism, fin de siècle naturist theosophy, the impact of Great War imagery, the conviction and projection of the Fascist vision and the genius of Arno Breker.

Issue 16.2

The Fascist elevation of the naked male body to representational eminence was the outcome in part of the efforts of German nineteenth-century historians and philosophers and the product in part also of those rebels, idealists and altruists of the fin de siècle seeking 'the healing power of the sun and the rhythms of nature' as antidotes to industrialization, urbanization and materialism. The cult of the naked body was fully incorporated into National Socialist ideology. The nude became symbolic of right-wing values. Art provided images of power - racially acceptable stereotypes of Aryan men. Under Fascism the imagery of male nudity projected heroic warriorhood. The Great War, according to George Mosse, cast a long shadow over the national male stereotype of the post-war years, while for the influential Ernst Jünger, this war shaped supermen; it produced a masculinity characterized by a new beauty - hard, ruthless, aggressive and for the first time openly sexual in libidinal violence; it came to define the nature of a manhood which had been tried and tested.

Issue 16.2

This essay reviews critical opinion on the social, cultural and aesthetic context of Leni Riefenstahl's cinematic representation of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Olympia. It argues that, in art terms, the film (and her earlier film of Nazi pageantry, Triumph of the Will) can only be truly understood if they are contextualized in the political culture of Nazi Germany. Blending textual analysis, aesthetic theory and cultural history, the article concludes that despite the aesthetic qualities of Riefenstahl's film-making, the film bolstered and promoted an elitist physicality which fuelled the flames of German Fascism.

Issue 16.2

Although Nazi ideologues saw the well-muscled male body as a symbol of racial vigour, they did not include the high-performance athlete in the pantheon of genuine Nazi heroes. First, the elite athlete was not directly relevant to economic productivity. Second, the collectivistic ethos of this totalitarian society discouraged the exhaltation of elite athletes except as they reflected indirectly the greater glory of the state. Third, Nazi racial doctrine conceded certain kinds of physical superiority to black athletes, thereby diminishing the importance of this type of human performance in the eyes of convinced racists. Most importantly, the Nazis regarded the warrior as the primary and incomparable male hero and saw athletes as deficient versions of the men who made war on behalf of the Fatherland.

Issue 16.2

The Nazi dream of breeding a perfect Aryan race, the Herrenvolk, struck much of the scientific community of the time as modern and logical. The measures taken to implement it were also rational, if inhumane: eliminating those of inferior reproductive potential from the breeding process; encouraging those of superior potential to reproduce more; and selecting and training the elite. This essay shows how sport and physical education were used to strengthen the race and to showcase the vitality of the new Germany, but it also demonstrates the cruelty of the efforts to shape Superman the Nazi way.

Issue 16.2

This essay investigates the historical and political development of racism, Social Darwinism, anti-Semitism and Aryan supremacy. It examines the origins, evolution and weaknesses of scientific claims for these ideologies, and show how they have been used to support the interests of a powerful bourgeoisie.

Issue 16.2

The body is our most reliable, continuous and comprehensive metaphor. In Western culture, despite a Judaeo-Christian tradition which has 'privileged mind over body', the body is irrefutably present, requiring and demanding attention. Social scientists have tended to ignore it, philosophers have deprecated it and theologians have considered it an enemy of the soul. Nevertheless its representational power is permanent. The body is the repository of symbolic interpretation, a focus for the deepest prejudice and the source of personal and social identity. Cultural history should extend the study of history in order to come to terms with the power of images of the body. In this consideration of the Fascist body as a representative symbol of Prometheus Unbound, a permanent aspiration in history, his words have determined action. The image of the 'New Aryan Body' of the Superman was not limited to 'the more restricted audiences for art', but was also projected on the sports field, in the military camp and through the youth groups, as well as the rally, festival and clinic.

Issue 16.2

Shaping the Superman is concerned with a modern male icon - the Aryan Man, the Superman of German Fascism - as Prometheus Unbound. It is a study of masculinity as a metaphor and especially of the muscular male body as a moral symbol - inviolable, invulnerable, dominant. It examines the need of mankind (in its generic sense) for muscular heroes, its adulation of mostly male images of superiority and security, attendant militarism and its repetitive search for Prometheus Unbound. Aggression, martial or otherwise, legalized and sanctioned or otherwise, is a constant characteristic of human existence. In his The Cultivation of Hatred (1993) Peter Gay is especially concerned with a triple rationale for the nineteenth-century aggression of European cultures and communities both among themselves and towards others: arguments for competition emanating from biological theory, the construction of the convenient 'other' resulting from pseudo-scientific 'discoveries' and comfortable prejudices, and a cult of manliness evolving directly out of an earlier aristocratic ideal of essential male prowess. This rationale has thunderous resonances for the Fascist Superman. Aloof nude posturing, ancient and modern, is a device 'to elevate man above time, space, particularity and decay'. It allows the transcendence of the specific and the contingent by the presentation of a superhuman beauty presented as an abstract image of male perfection. The naked warriors of Aryan Fascism had precisely the same role as those of ancient Greece, as this volume reveals. Victorian 'science' and Grecian imagery provided horrendous legacies.

Issue 16.2

A good deal has been written about the rise of professionalism in modern cricket but this subject will never be properly understood until the benefits and testimonials of county cricketers are explored in greater depth. These awards have traditionally been regarded as insurance policies and retirement plans by both the professionals themselves and the general public. It was on the consequences of their benefit match that the future of many former stars ultimately depended. The benefit was a most important matter indeed, especially at a time when professional cricketers were less generously rewarded for their skills than other stars in the sporting world and/or the entertainment business. This article tries to present as much factual information as can be gleaned from the published sources on the size of benefits and testimonials awarded by the English first-class cricket counties in the 40 years following the Second World War.

Issue 16.1

This study sets out to analyse the rules of competition in the 'Open Shooting Festival' (Freischiessen) in medieval German cities. It focuses on the latter half of the fifteenth century, and discusses: the content of the letters of invitation; the qualifications, the size of and distance from the target; the regulations of shooting posture; the committee of arbitration; the prizes; the lottery and other competitions; and the purpose of the open shooting festival.

Issue 16.1

'Pea soup' football matches were played and organized by women from the working-class communities of Wigan and Leigh during the miners' lock out of 1921. Encouraged by local labour movements and by their menfolk and inspired by the famous Dick, Kerr's Ladies Football team from Preston, they played on farmer's fields in front of crowds exceeding 5,000 to raise money for the soup kitchens which fed the miners' children. 'Pea soup' football is highly significant in two fundamental areas. Firstly, it reveals how football was regarded as both a vehicle of community cohesion and social emancipation for women, and secondly, it is representative of what Ouditt defines as the 'plucky heroine' ideology contrived during the war effort, where women and girls were thrown into traditional male roles at home, in the work place and on the sports field.

Issue 16.1

Contrary to the mythology that declares that the Canadian state was characterized by a laissez-faire philosophy, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century the nascent polity assumed increasing responsibility for the development of the country's economic infrastructure. The state encouraged the frenzied building of canals and railroads, many funded with public money, that facilitated transportation of raw materials to production centres and the finished product to markets. By controlling immigration and land-granting policies the state fostered a particular labour market. This article demonstrates how the Canadian state's involvement in sport originated in an attempt to control a particular segment of the population, thus creating conditions favourable to capital accumulation.

Issue 16.1

This essay is about baseball in prison - in the Japanese-American internment camps of The Second World War. Its empirical universe is, more specifically, restricted to Minidoka Internment Camp in Idaho and Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming and the Pacific Northwest Japanese-American communities that populated these desert institutions. It is also about the ritualized public order of modern sport at the micro-level of analysis and experience and what happens when that order is temporarily threatened. It is an example of the boundaries of the normal tested in abnormal circumstances, typical of Goffman's approach which sought out sub-cultures and social disruptions only to expose the unnoticed conventions of civil life.

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Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

Issue 14.3 - Special Issue - The Nordic World: Sport in Society

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Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

Issue 13.1 - Special Issue: European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport

September 2002