Alert: Apprently, miracles can happen. This blog post is about genealogy — and sports.
We are now at the midway point of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.
This year’s games may go down as the Olympics when women dominated the news and social media — and made history.
This is the first time a female sprinter from Saudi Arabia has competed, an African-American woman won a gold medal in swimming for the first time, 16-year-old swimmer Penny Oleksiak has won more medals at a single Summer Olympics than any other Canadian in history — and sports announcers, interviewers, and newspapers are being raked over the coals for how they are reporting on female athletes.
(How the four Saudi Arabian women are able to compete in the Olympics boggles the mind — and impresses. Huffington Post notes, “Today, women living in Saudi Arabia cannot participate in state-organized sports leagues, national tournaments, or even attend their national team’s games as spectators.”)
Since the Olympics is drawing much of our attention, this is an ideal time to look at the sports our female ancestors may have been allowed to take part in.
Tennis team, 1920. Photo: Library and Archives Canada 1990-112NPC.
In the introduction to its online exhibit, Women in Sports, that will help you learn what sports women played during the past few centuries, Historica notes:
“For hundreds of years, very few sports were considered appropriate for women, whether for reasons of supposed physical frailty, or the alleged moral dangers of vigorous exercise. Increasingly, women have claimed their right to participate not only in what were deemed graceful and feminine sports, but also in the sweaty, rough-and-tumble games their brothers played. In the 21st century, many previously forbidden sports (e.g., boxing, soccer, rugby) have been opened to female players.”
The online exhibit takes you through the pre-Colonial period when it is thought that Aboriginal women likely participated in some games, to New France when upper-class women were encouraged to go horseback riding, to the end of the 19th century when middle- and upper-class women played in sports such as tennis, golf, and curling, and to 2013.
Learn more about what sports our grandmothers, great-grandmothers and generations earlier may have played in Women in Sports.
