It is widely recognised that women encounter barriers to participation and involvement
in sport. How these issues have gained recognition and become legitimised within
dominant sporting and non-sporting rhetoric is less well understood. The lobbying and
activism of women and sport organisations has been relatively overlooked in favour of
making sense of the growing awareness of how the structure and practice of sport
subordinates women. Based on an interpretive thematic analysis of documents from
the Anita White Foundation International Women and Sport Movement Archive and 21
semi-structured interviews with 24 key personnel from women and sport organisations,
this thesis uses social movement literature to focus on the processes involved with
mobilising and politicising women’s activism in sport, predominantly the period 1949 to
1997.
Over time, uncoordinated groups of disparate women became a collective and
formalised into national, regional, and international organisations. The mobilisation of a
variety of resources by these groups has helped to affect positive change for women
and sport through the publication of major governmental and non-governmental
discourse, for example. However, the most substantial work to have focused on this
activism also provides a strong critique with regard to whether the white, Western
women who have directed global advances for women and sport represented
difference through their dialogue (Hargreaves, 2000). This thesis challenges this
critique by using social movement literature and postcolonial feminist theory to provide
reasons both for why the movement has predominantly grown in Western contexts,
and, why it has struggled to connect with some non-Western areas.
The thesis provides the ‘Women and Sport Movement (W&SM)’ as a term to
encompass women and sport activism, and includes an analysis of the origins,
development, and relations between different women and sport organisations nationally
and internationally, the outcomes and impact of their activism, and possibilities for
future directions.