The Female Tradition in Physical Education: Women First reconsidered

David Kirk · Patricia Vertinsky

Feb 2016 · Routledge

About this ebook

The Female Tradition in Physical Education re-examines a key question in the history of modern education: why did the remarkably successful leaders of female physical education, who pioneered the development of the subject in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, lose control in the years following the Second World War? Despite the later resurgence of second wave feminism they never regained a voice, with the result that male leadership was able to shift the curriculum in ways that neglected the needs and interests of girls and young women.

Drawing on new sources and a range of historiographical approaches, and touching on related fields such as therapeutic exercise and dance, the book examines the development of physical education for girls in a number of countries to offer an alternative explanation to the dominant narrative of the ‘demise’ of the female tradition.

Providing an important contextualization for the state of contemporary female physical education, this is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the development of sport and physical education, women’s and gender history, and physical culture more generally.

About the author

David Kirk is Professor and Head of the School of Education at the University of Strathclyde, UK, and formerly held the Alexander Chair in Physical Education and Sport at the University of Bedfordshire. He is author of studies of two curriculum histories in physical education, Defining Physical Education (Routledge, 1992) and Schooling Bodies (Cassell, 1998). His most recent books are Physical Education Futures (Routledge, 2010) and Girls, Gender and Physical Education: An Activist Approach (with Kimberly L. Oliver, Routledge, 2015).

Patricia Vertinsky is Professor of Kinesiology and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is author of The Eternally Wounded Woman: Doctors, Women and Exercise in the Late 19th Century ( University of Illinois Press, 1990); Sites of Sport: Space, Place and Experience (with John Bale, Routledge, 2004); Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument and Modernism (with Sherry McKay, Routledge, 2004), and Physical Culture, Power and the Body (with Jennifer Hargreaves, Routledge, 2007).