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Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women's Sports, by Jennifer Hargreaves, New York: Routledge, 1994. 331 pp. $69.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-415-07027-9. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 0-414-07028-7.
Jennifer Hargreaves's Sporting Females, winner of the 1994 book award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, builds a strong case for the importance of sport in buttressing ideas of male supremacy and sexism. She shows how sport became intimately linked to Victorian conceptions of the body and to beliefs about masculinity and femininity, providing the Victorians with evidence for their beliefs in men's "natural" superiority over women in cultural and economic affairs. While Hargreaves is mostly interested in the history of women's sport in England, she briefly describes women's struggle...