Women in Sports History

Carol A. Osborne is Researcher Developer in the Department of Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange (RIKE) at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She has edited and published work in the field of women’s sports history and maintains a particular interest in the history of British climbing. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Sport in History. Fiona Skillen is senior lecturer in History in the Department of Social Sciences, in the School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University. Her research interests concern women’s sport during the late 19th and 20th centuries and has published extensively in this area. She regularly contributes to radio and television programmes on the history of sport. She is a former Chair of British Society of Sport History, serves on the editorial board of the journal Sport in History and is an editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

1. Introduction: Women in sports history: the more things change, the more they stay the same? 2. Establishing women in sports history: Manchester City football club 3. Sisters doing it for themselves: the rich history of women’s football in Scotland from the 1960s to 2020 4. Marguerite Wilson and other ‘hard-riding…feminine space eaters’: cycling and modern femininity in interwar Britain 5. Women’s sport and the feminism conundrum: the case of interwar English cricket 6. Shares, shirts and soap suds: women and rugby league football in Liverpool, 1934–1950 7. Women, sport and the people’s war in Britain, 1939–45 8. ‘Here’s the football heroine’: female American football players, 1890–1912