When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear

Abstract

Patricia Campbell Warner has delivered an important work, the product of twenty years of research. It is the first scholarly treatment to systematically analyze the evolution of women's sportswear in the United States, a subject little studied and relatively unknown in the realm of cultural changes affected by women. Warner divides the book into two parts. The first six chapters cover the public displays of clothing in the pursuit of individual sports, such as croquet, ice skating, tennis, swimming, and cycling. The eight chapters in part 2 examine private dress, such as that worn in segregated gymnastic classes, physical education, and women's basketball games, as well as the merger of public and private by the 1930s. Warner concludes that the donning of new clothing for activities represented a cultural shift and a transition in gender roles. She posits that this transition occurred in the women's colleges, where students enjoyed greater liberty for experimentation away from the prying eyes of the male gaze. The result was a distinctively American style of sportswear that she asserts is “the most important clothing of the twentieth century and beyond … It is undeniably American, yet it is worn by most people all over the world” (p. 3).