From Mixed-Sex Sport to Sport for Girls: The Feminization of Figure Skating

Abstract

The history of women's sport is often written as a history of gender segregation and women's subordination. This article, however, demonstrates the historical contingency of gendered sport categories and argues that gender segregation has not always been fundamental to the organization of competitive sports. Drawing on the history of figure skating, the article illustrates how a once ‘manly exercise’ went through a relatively gender-balanced period in the early 1900s before coming to be understood, by the end of the Second World War, as a ‘girls' sport’. Focusing on the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s as significant decades in this change, the paper discusses the factors that contributed to the shift in the meanings of skating: the popularity of Norwegian Olympic champion Sonja Henie, whose post-competition career as a Hollywood film star brought figure skating to a mass audience for the first time; women's increasing prominence as the technical innovators of the sport; and the intersection of these factors with the social and demographic changes that resulted from the Second World War.