Women And Modern Sport

Modern sport has always been a crucial cultural domain for the construction and reproduction of dominant, heterosexual masculine identities. Historically, the modern sport has been a key social space for the production and reproduction of different kinds of patriarchal social relations and identities, in which power is held by men and women are confined to subordinate roles and positions. Women have engaged in a long and still incomplete struggle to engage fully with the modern sport. Women’s involvement in popular team sports tended to be closely controlled by men in accordance with patriarchal norms. In the early and mid-twentieth, substantial numbers of women, particularly in urban industrialized societies, enjoyed significant empowerment, reflecting their crucial wartime roles, wider political emancipation, growth in employment, and position within the expanding mass consumer culture. Socialist societies promoted women’s sport alongside official policies of militarized nation-building and female industrial equality. In China, the communist-inspired Red Sport Movement was founded in 1932 and sought to produce more active identities, ‘iron bodies’, and fresh duties and responsibilities for women. In contrast, fascist regimes pursued social policies that relegated women to domestic drudgery yet also exploited the rational nationalism of sporting successes for both genders.