‘No Time for Recreations till the Vote is Won’? Suffrage Activists and Leisure in Edwardian Britain

Women in sports history: the more things change, the more they stay the same?

“…34 From the perspective of women's history it could, therefore, still be the case that competitive sport, physical recreation and leisure are still being 'overlooked in favour of topics [seen as more] crucial to female advancement in the public sphere'. 35 It could, however, just as easily be the case that those scholars researching the experiences of girls and women in sport are targeting their research to those journals where it is more likely to find an enthusiastic readership. The recent publication of Murray Phillips' analysis of 'impact' as it pertains to comparison between sports history journals and generic history titles raises the question of why would a sports historian necessarily prioritise finding publication in one of the generic titles when there are sports history journals well-ranked in their own right?…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2007

“…Lack of money and other material constraints restricted many working‐class men's participation. Kay establishes the popularity of sporting and other leisure pursuits among women's suffrage activists, showing that many led active lives beyond their campaigning activities. The cinema in London before the First World War is the subject of an article by McKernan, who analyses the geographical spread of the early cinemas, and recovers the experience of attending, emphasizing the low prices and continuous showings that characterized this period.…”

Sport and Social Movements

“…The inclusion of women in the Olympic Games came about as a result of the actions of key women sport leaders, most notably France's Alice Milliat, engaged in concerted international political action against gender discrimination in sport. At risk of understating the importance of the suffrage movement for women and women's physical activity opportunities (see Kay 2007; and neglecting the tremendous developments happening in women's sport in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within different nations around the world (e.g. see Kidd 1996or Hall 2002 for discussion of the role of early women's sport organizations in Canada), a brief examination of the rise and eventual decline of Milliat's Women's Olympic Games in the 1920s and 1930s is warranted given that it represents, in many ways, the most cogent example of an early international feminist social movement on women and sport.…”