Physical education: a gendered history

Abstract

Many people who grew to adulthood between the 1960s and 1990s in Britain will believe that British society has moved a long way to resolve gender issues in sport and physical education. They may point to women's participation in marathon running or rugby, or look to girls and boys playing together in co-educational physical education classes as proof that we now have equality between the sexes in sport and physical education. However, some less sanguine members of the public may remind us that girls remain more likely to drop out of sport than boys and that in some elite sport contexts women do not receive the same rewards as men for what are arguably as good or better performances. Others might suggest that in order to gain public recognition and acceptance of their participation, women have increasingly had to 'play like men' (Hargreaves, 1994), or rather, like certain men. As other authors in this collection emphasise, particular forms of masculinity remain dominant in many sporting contexts and this dominance serves to exclude both women and men from participation, enjoyment and/or achievement in sport.

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