Beyond Mapping Experience

In a recent essay reviewing the historical works on women in politics and work, Elaine Tyler May, a perceptive social historian, argued that women’s history in general is flourishing. She based her judgment on a course correction, a change in direction, which the sub-discipline had reflected during the last few years. Once its task had been to “uncover women’s buried past and place the female experience on the map of history.” Recently, however, the results of those discoveries have been enabling historians to actually redraw the historical map, “to correct the distortions and rethink several of the guiding principles of historical inquiry.” Women’s history has established the bases for re-interpretations of politics and work; it has confirmed gender as a fundamental historical variable; and it now lies at the center of “theoretical debates and methodological innovations.” Much remains to be done, to be sure, especially the task of reuniting the experiences of both sexes in an historical whole. But, in May’s judgment at least, the weaving of “new conceptualizations into the historical fabric” marks a solid transition from the past to the future of women’s history.” For sport historians, May’s discussion of women’s history provides some guidance and some questions which we might use in examining that sub-field of ours which intersects with women’s history-women’s sport history. The interest of scholars in the history of women in sport is quite obvious; conference presentations and published papers and anthologies ae common. Yet,