In the earliest depictions of the schoolgirl in British girls’ fiction, she is far from the hockey stick wielding tomboys recognisable in the stories of Angela Brazil and Elinor Brent-Dyer, instead restricted to crocodile walks and movement-limiting dress codes. Over the first decades of the twentieth-century, popular depictions of the schoolgirl radically changed her into a games fanatic, distinct from both her Victorian literary ancestors and the real modern schoolgirl she ostensibly represented.
The advent of the sporting schoolgirl in girls’ media offered revised codes of what was considered acceptable behaviour for girls, re-envisioning Victorian femininity to incorporate a patriotic, masculinised vision of modern girlhood which presented sport as a gateway to the previously inaccessible heroism and honour available to boys. Through sport, the increasingly stigmatised stereotypes of ill-health and melodrama attached to Victorian womanhood were rejected in favour of an emotionally restrained and physically active masculine girlhood. This seminar looks to a range of early twentieth-century authors such as Brazil and Dorothea Moore to investigate how representations of sport offered a tool by which femininity was redefined for a new century of athletic women and girls.
Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a PhD student at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores Victorian and Edwardian girls’ school fiction, and she is widely interested in the development of girls’ cultural identities and their popular representation in British and Irish media.
","author_name":"British Society of Sports History"}