Liz Zanoni
Western Michigan University
American Women's Sporting Attire,
Consumer Culture, and Material Culture
in the 1920s
The rise of the consumer culture during the 1920s
shifted the issue of American women's sporting attire from
the private confines of middle class women's colleges and
specialized journals to a more consumer-driven, national
culture.
Diverse members of America's sporting
community - women physical educators, male sports
promoters, sports journalists, and leading female athletes 151
contributed to the popularization of women's sport
costuming. These participants in the sporting culture
debated, challenged, and reinforced gender patterns in early
twentieth century American society.
This paper explores American women's sporting
attire and changes in the perception of gender and athletics
with a focus on material culture and sport history. Material
culture approaches to sport history offer new source
material to reveal connections between ideology and
artifact. An interdisciplinary methodology that examines
sporting attire as a primary source of material culture in
women's sport history reveals clothing as both a symbol of
gender distinction and as an agent of change that fashions
cultural and social constructions of female athletes and
their bodies.
The 1920s presented new opportunities for several
women in sports, as a change from earlier Victorian
ideologies that kept women from pursuing athletics on an
extensive scale. From the ranks of these new sportswomen
rose a select few that earned celebrity status in a 1920s
culture obsessed with consumption and leisure through
sport. Swimming champions Aileen Riggins and Gertrude
Ederle, tennis luminary Helen Jacobs, and golfer Glenna
Collett were some of the female vanguards featured in the
national press for athletic accomplishments and their new,
modern, and oftentimes, controversial images of
womanliness.
Women athletes and their clothing shaped public
impressions about women's athletics and acted as cultural
sites of physical culture in a new consumer society where
women pursed aesthetic and athletic ideals, lifestyles, and
physiques.
Primary sources such as articles,
advertisements and photographs in women's magazines,
popular periodicals and professional journals of physical
education and sporting associations, as well as sports
manufacturing catalogues from the 1920s and 1930s
expressed the viewpoints of participants in the sporting
culture. The paper reveals that members of the sporting
152
community approached the issue of outfitting the first
national female athletic stars with diverse and often
conflicting perspectives about sportswomen and their attire.
Allen Guttmann
NASSH Book Award Winner
153