Abstract
At first glance, case studies about women servicing junior and men's elite tennis in Australia and professional women golfers in the USA would seem to have very little in common. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Both Shona Thompson's richly descriptive and sometimes disturbing qualitative study on the extent to which women service tennis in Western Australia, and Todd Crossett's highly illuminating ethnographic study of the US Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) circuit, address the paradox of how women 'do' gender (West and Zimmerman, 1987) in sport — a context that is one of the main vehicles for the construction and affirmation of hegemonic masculinity. By focusing on women's experience at different levels and within different contexts, both studies demonstrate how sport remains such a strong masculinist institution. The authors have achieved this through a rich and complex tapestry of qualitative data, which brings forth the mostly silent women's voice in a way that only a few sociological studies on women in sport have done. The quality and clarity of the data in both studies has meant that there is no need for the tennis or golf novice to possess an in-depth knowledge of either sport in order to contextualize the women's stories.
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