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By Allen Guttmann. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. xiii + 339 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-231-06956-1.)
Allen Guttmann is the author of four previous books on sports. In this latest book Guttmann has written a complete overview of women in sport from ancient times to the present.
The title of this book is certainly the least creative of the five. There are few books on women's sports history, and perhaps he felt that an imaginative title was unnecessary. He states that women have never been involved in sports "as participants or spectators as men have." He contends, as do many others, that this is cultural, not biological, and one purpose of his study is to demonstrate that women were to some extent always involved in what may be called sport. His focus is on sports of women and older girls...