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ABSTRACT
‘What an absurdity’: thus railed ‘P. Barnsby, Male Coach’ in the Letters page of Rowing magazine in August 1973, on the appointment of Penny Chuter as professional rowing coach for the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA). The flurry of responses prompted by his letter suggest that his views were not aligned with the majority of the rowing community; yet women’s role and position in the sport was still highly contested. Chuter’s appointment as an ARA National Coach, an elite level role with responsibility for the national squad as well as coach education in clubs, complicated and extended this polemic. Situated at the intersection of societal fears around female athleticism, employment and leadership – and the ideological conflict within the conservative Amateur Rowing Association about professional coaches regardless of gender – it provoked the rowing community to express some of its most profound uncertainties and anxieties about gender, and about the sport itself and the manner in which it should be undertaken. This paper explores these anxieties within the social context of second wave feminism and related shifts in gender norms, and the sporting context of British amateur rowing in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘Men’s Lib’, Rowing, August 1973, 38.
2 Ibid.
3 Rowing, September 1973, 48–9 includes a lengthy selection of letters responding to Barnsby.
4 See Amanda Schweinbenz, ‘Against Hegemonic Currents: Women’s Rowing into the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, Sport in History 30, no. 2 (2010): 309–26.
5 The WARA was formed in 1923 and operated as an independent organisation, run by women, until amalgamation with the ARA in 1963.
6 ‘A.R.A. Annual Report – 1973’, Almanack 1974, 184. Eleanor Lester was elected to the ARA Council, in her role as Chair of the Women’s Amateur Rowing Committee. A women’s committee or commission within the ARA would remain until 2003.
7 ‘Long Distance Races’, Almanack 1974, 39–41. Twenty-four of 252 entries were women’s crews.
8 ‘The National Championships 1973’, Almanack 1974, 79. Such metrics for assessing participation rates in competitive rowing are not claimed to be comprehensive, but the most comparable between the men’s and women’s sports. A further point of comparison would be the amount of coverage of the men’s and women’s sports in the almanack itself, where these details were recorded. In the 1974 edition, of the 272 pages of information and editorial on the sport; only four were dedicated to women’s rowing.
9 The men’s equivalent of the championship races had been established in 1893 respectively, while men’s rowing was one of the sports on the programme of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. From 1962 the men’s World Championships were to be held once every four years, and the European Championships every year. From 1974, the European Championships were replaced with annual World Championships for both men and women.
10 Women would race in six boat classes, men in eight. The 2020 Olympic Games will be the first to offer an equal amount of men’s and women’s rowing events.
11 The course was one kilometre, compared to the two kilometres raced by men. See Amanda N. Schweinbenz, ‘Selling Femininity: The Introduction of Women’s Rowing at the 1976 Olympic Games’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 26, no. 5 (2009): 654–72.
12 Letter from Amy Gentry to Lady Ethel Desborough, 3 October 1927. Part of the collection held at the River & Rowing Museum, Henley on Thames.
13 Minutes of the WARA from 1923 to 1952 are held at British Rowing Headquarters in Hammersmith. Discussion around the inclusion of women’s rowing at the Olympics over this period took place on the following dates: 4 February 1927; 4 May 1927; 16 February 1928; 30 March 1936; 16 May 1946; 1 November 1948; 24 February 1949; 9 November 1949; 7 March 1952; 24 July 1952.
14 Kevin B. Wamsley, ‘The Global Sport Monopoly: A Synopsis of 20th Century Olympic Politics’, International Journal 57, no. 3 (2002): 395–410 explores the extent, and the highly politicised nature, of this influence. He claims,
so far reaching is the influence of the so-called modern Olympic movement that we do not or cannot imagine any alternatives for sport […] such ideological pervasiveness endows a singular institution with the capital not just to organize events, but also to define, delineate, and sustain particular meanings about sport, competition, and how human bodies are to be trained, presented, and understood. (395–6)
15 British female rowers were not alone in this aim, and inclusion in the Olympics was an important goal for multiple women’s sports in multiple sports. See Florence Carpentier and Jean-Pierre Lefèvre, ‘The Modern Olympic Movement, Women’s Sport and the Social Order during the Inter-War Period’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 23, no. 7 (2006): 1112–27.
16 Schweinbenz, ‘Selling Femininity’, 654–72.
17 Carla Lam, ‘Feminist Biology’, in Gender: Nature, ed. Iris van der Tuin (Farmington Hills: Macmillan, 2016), 32.
18 See for example Patricia A. Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Barbara Harrison, ‘Women and Health’, in Women’s History: Britain 1850–1945: An Introduction, ed. June Purvis (Oxford: Routledge, 1995), 157–92; Kathleen E. McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women 1870–1914 (London: Routledge, 1988); Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports (London: Routledge, 1994). McCrone makes a causal link between the expansion of sport for women and female emancipation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Hargreaves also considers the reconfiguring of femininity and female agency in and through sport (‘The Legitimation of Female Exercise: The Case of Physical Education’, Sporting Females, 63–87).
19 Jackman is frequently referenced in the press swimming for Hammersmith Ladies’ Swimming Club from 1926 until 1931. She appears to have won the 1927 championship (‘Women Competitors’, Western Mail, 3 July 1929 references the loss of her title in 1928, implying a win in 1927) and 1929 (a number of papers reported on this win, including Hampshire Telegraph and Post 26 July 1929, ‘Girl’s swimming triumph: Miss Gladys [sic] Jackman wins five miles championship’). Chuter has reported that despite being selected for the 1932 Olympics, her mother did not compete due to the financial demands imposed by the BOA. See Helena Smalman-Smith, ‘Rowing Story: Penny Chuter’, https://rowingstory.com/people/penny-chuter/ (accessed November 25, 2018).
20 For the first year of her international racing career, Chuter was a student at a local technical college. In both cases, sculling remained her priority. See Smalman-Smith, ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Informal conversation with Penny Chuter, 30 October 2017.
23 Christopher Dodd, ‘Penny Wise to Pound Oxford’, Guardian, December 1, 1994, 25.
24 Chuter served on the FISA Women’s Commission from 1983, but when she assumed this role in 1985, she became the first woman appointed to any commission other than the Women’s Commission.
25 Penny Chuter, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, private document shared with researcher by Chuter.
26 Lynn Segal, ‘Jam Today: Feminist Impacts and Transformations in the 1970s’, in Reassessing 1970s Britain, ed. Lawrence Black et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 151. See also Adam Lent, British Social Movements Since 1945: Sex, Colour, Peace and Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 7.
27 See Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain Since 1914, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2015), 262. Pugh argues that women’s liberation was a consequence of the coming of age of baby-boomers: a generation enjoying greater health, affluence and access to employment, with a corresponding shift in terms of aspirations and the expectation of being able to deploy and develop individual talents.
28 Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London: Penguin, 2000), xii.
29 This is not limited to issues of gender: the characterisation of the 1960s as increasingly liberal and increasingly radical has also been challenged. See for example Brian Harrison, ‘The Sixties’, in Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2009), 472–531.
30 Jane Lewis, Women in Britain Since 1945: Women, Family, Work and the State in the Post-War Years (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 42.
31 Ibid., 43. Pugh also tempers his view with the observation that, for all the change driven and experienced by women over this time, ‘Britain was hardly a society in the grip of permissiveness’ (Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement, 263).
32 See Pat Thane, ‘Women and the 1970s: Towards Liberation?’, in Reassessing 1970s Britain, ed. Black et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 167.
33 Patricia M. Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make? Women in Public and Private Life in Britain Since 1918’, Historical Research 76, no. 192 (2003), 278.
34 Helen McCarthy, ‘Gender Equality’, in Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945, ed. Pat Thane (London: Continuum, 2010), 113.
35 Thane, ‘What Difference did the Vote Make?’, 278.
36 Thane, ‘Women and the 1970s’, 173.
37 Gerry Holloway, Women and Work in Britain Since 1840 (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), 181. Holloway notes the particular importance of this as an example of successful collective action among women.
38 The New Earnings Survey (NES), which began in 1968, revealed women to be heavily over-represented among the lowest-paid groups, and that ‘the great majority were concentrated in a small number of occupations in which the labour force was predominantly female’ (McCarthy, ‘Gender Equality’, 113). Despite increasing legislation for women in the workplace, and increasing numbers of women in employment, the majority of women in work remained in less secure, lower-paid and lower-status occupations.
39 See for example Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 43.
40 Joyce Kay, ‘A Window of Opportunity? Preliminary Thoughts on Women’s Sport in Post-War Britain’, Sport in History 30, no. 2 (2010): 196–217.
41 Rafaelle Nicholson, ‘“Like a Man Trying to Knit”?: Women’s Cricket in Britain, 1945–2000’ (PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2015), 92.
42 Jean Williams, A Game for Rough Girls?: A History of Women’s Football in Britain (London: Routledge, 2003), 41–2.
43 A list of coaches and captains of Netball World Championship sides from 1963 to 2003 is available at http://www.ournetballhistory.org.uk/content/people/coaches/world-netball-championships-captains-and-coaches. All nine of the coaches over this period were women.
44 See for example Wamsley, ‘The Global Sport Monopoly’, 395–410.
45 ‘The Olympic Programme: Women’s Progression’, Olympic Review, no. 195–196 (1984), 27. For women, the 200-metre swimming medley and the kayak slalom and were introduced in 1968 and 1972 respectively, and both withdrawn in 1976. Over the same period, twenty-five men’s events were introduced, and five removed.
46 Anita White and Celia Brackenridge, ‘Who Rules Sport? Gender Divisions in the Power Structure of British Sports Organisations from 1960’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 20, no. 1–2 (1985), 98.
47 Ibid., 98.
48 The Central Council of Physical Recreation, Sport & the Community: The Report of the Wolfenden Committee on Sport, September 1960.
49 Barrie Houlihan and Anita White, The Politics of Sports Development: Development of Sport or Development through Sport? (London: Routledge, 2002) locate early sports development in Britain the 1950s and 1960s, and its expansion into mainstream British sport and sports policy from the mid-1970s. See also Dave Day and Tegan Carpenter, A History of Sports Coaching in Britain: Overcoming Amateurism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 171–7 for further detail and analysis of government intervention at this time.
50 Dennis Howell MP, Sports Council, HC Deb 03 February 1965 vol. 705 cc. 1082, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1965/feb/03/sports-council (accessed December 3, 2018).
51 Sport & the Community, 110–11.
52 See Dodd, World Rowing, 224; Dilwyn Porter, ‘The End of the Amateur Hegemony in British Sport, c.1960–2000’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 43, no. 2 (2011): 69–80; Stephen Wagg, ‘“Base Mechanic Arms?” British Rowing, Some Ducks and the Shifting Politics of Amateurism’, Sport in History 26, no. 3 (2006): 523–5.
53 Eric Halladay, Rowing in England: A Social History: The Amateur Debate (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 3–4.
54 Cited in Neil Wigglesworth, A Social History of English Rowing (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 3.
55 R.C. Lehmann, The Complete Oarsman (London: Methuen, 1908), 15.
56 Day and Carpenter, A History of Sports Coaching in Britain, 3. They further note that ‘the struggle of female coaches to gain parity with their male peers continues to the present day’.
57 Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 43.
58 McCarthy, ‘Gender Equality’, 113.
59 Guardian, April 19, 1973, 26.
60 For example ‘The Third National Coach: Why Penny Chuter’, Rowing, June 1976, 6. Mainstream news offered less detail, but stated her credentials as a PE teacher (‘Feminine Touch for British Rowing’, Birmingham Post, April 19, 1973, 18; Guardian, April 19, 1973, 26).
61 Guardian, April 19, 1973, 26.
62 See ‘Annual Report of the A.R.A. 1970’, Almanack 1971, 192, and Christine Peer, ‘Three Cheers for the A.R.A.’s Coaching Award Scheme’, Rowing, May 1973, 17.
63 ‘A.R.A. Annual Report – 1973’, Almanack 1974, 184. This report indicates that of the 191 awards, 39 were at Club Level, and the remainder were at Basic Level. No information is provided regarding the gender split across this group.
64 Scoping work carried out in 1971 indicated that ‘there were very few coaches in the country, and of these few were up to the necessary standard’ (‘Annual Report of the A.R.A. 1971’, Almanack 1972, 200).
65 ‘Annual Report of the A.R.A. 1970’, Almanack 1971, 192.
66 Christine Peer, ‘Three Cheers for the A.R.A.’s Coaching Award Scheme’, Rowing, May 1973, 17.
67 For more analysis of craft in coaching see Dave Day, ‘Craft Coaching and the “Discerning Eye” of the Coach’, International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching 6, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 179–95.
68 Writing about football in 2002, Jean Williams highlighted that five female coaches with full A Licence coaching qualifications had been ‘overlooked’ in recruiting for the role of England coach, and that the successful candidate at that time had no formal coaching qualification; the extent to which experience is considered a qualification for such appointments may itself be a gendered issue. Jean Williams, ‘The Revival of Women’s Football in England from the 1960s to the Present’ (PhD thesis, De Montfort University, 2002), 47.
69 See Smalman-Smith, ‘Rowing Story: Penny Chuter’. Her attempts to learn from athletes in other sporting disciplines also noted here, including distance runners like Herb Elliott, Gordon Pirie and Derek Ibbotson, offer further evidence of her self-improvement.
70 Guardian, April 19, 1973, 26.
71 ‘The Third National Coach: Why Penny Chuter’, Rowing, June 1976.
72 ‘Feminine Touch for British Rowing’, Birmingham Post, April 19, 1973, 18.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Nicholas Owen, ‘Men and the 1970s British Women’s Liberation Movement’, The Historical Journal 56, no. 3 (2013): 801–26 considers male involvement with feminist activities and agendas.
76 Guardian, April 19, 1973, 26.
77 Page held the role of Honorary Secretary from 1952 until 1963, and Secretary from 1963 until his retirement from the association in 1972; his distance from the organisation at the time of writing was minimal.
78 J.H. Page, ‘Rowing Women (Man’s View)’, Rowing, September–October 1973, 48–9.
79 Ibid.
80 See for example Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (Oxford: Routledge, 1999), 335–40. Kent identifies the 1960s as the start of a ‘breakdown’ in ‘post war consensus about the appropriate nature of government and society’.
81 See Brian Harrison, Finding a Role?: The United Kingdom, 1970–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 251–4. Pugh notes the expansion of opportunities in higher education for women (Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 262); fuller discussion is offered in Nicholas Hillman, ‘From Grants for All to Loans for All: Undergraduate Finance from the Implementation of the Anderson Report (1962) to the Implementation of the Browne Report (2012)’, Contemporary British History 27, no. 3, (2013): 249–70.
82 Lincoln Allison, Amateurism in Sport: An Analysis and a Defence (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 5. Allison offers a thorough characterisation and discussion of amateurism.
83 This authority, and notably its discrimination by class, had been challenged, notably by Dr James Furnivall, who formed a separate, amateur governing body for rowing (the National Amateur Rowing Association) with a less exclusionary agenda in 1890.
84 ‘A.R.A. Innovations’, Rowing, May 1961, 349–50. When the decision to recruit a National Trainer – a move described as a ‘giant step forwards’ – it was made explicit that the focus of the role was to ‘given to physical fitness rather than to watermanship’.
85 ‘“Don’t Expect Me to Wave a Magic Wand” Says New Training Chief’, Rowing, November 1963, 4; Chris Dodd offers additional biographical detail in ‘Jim Railton Obituary’, Guardian, September 7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/07/jim-railton-obituary (accessed July 24, 2017).
86 Christopher Dodd, The Story of World Rowing (London: Stanley Paul, 1992), 131 offers brief biographical details on Janousek; Rowing identifies him as ‘a member of what the Czechs call “their golden generation”’ (‘Janousek Has the Answers’, Rowing, December 1969/January 1970, 6).
87 Even at the start of his career with the ARA, Vincett offered some scathing, public criticism of traditional amateur approaches to training. See ‘ARA’s New Appointment: Roger Vincett to be Second National Coach’, Rowing, July 1970, 9–11. Vincett is quoted as saying that ‘a lot of oarsmen and coaches do not think seriously enough about their sport, and consequently are not as good at it as they might be […] too many coaches are too traditional in their ideas’.
88 Thane, ‘Women and the 1970s’, 183.
89 Nicholson, ‘Like a Man Trying to Knit’, 142.
90 Joan Filkins, ‘Women’s Rowing’, Almanack 1974, 74.
91 Guardian, April 19, 1973, 26.
92 Kay, ‘A Window of Opportunity?’, 213–14.
93 ‘Feminine Touch for British Rowing’, Birmingham Post, April 19, 1973, 18.
94 See Jane Pilcher, ‘The Gender Significance of Women in Power: British Women Talking about Margaret Thatcher’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 2, no. 4 (November 1995): 493–508.
95 ‘Paddling Against the Current: A History of Women’s Competitive International Rowing Between 1954 and 2003’ (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2007), 17.
96 Smalman-Smith, ‘Rowing Story: Penny Chuter’ (published after 2016).
97 Ibid.
98 Kay, ‘A Window of Opportunity?’, 213.
99 The Amateur Athletic Association (AAA), for example, which is suggestive some parallels to the ARA in terms of legacies relating to gender and amateurism, appointed a female President, Dame Marea Hartman, at the point of amalgamating with the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association (WAAA) in 1991. Hartman’s position as a volunteer, including acting as team manager for the women’s athletics team from 1956 to 1978, forms an interesting counterpoint to Chuter’s as a professional. See Lynne Duval, ‘The Development of Women’s Track and Field in England: The Role of the Athletic Club, 1920s–1950s’, The Sports Historian 21, no. 1 (May 1, 2001), 16 draws attention to three women whose role in athletics is often underplayed: Hartman and Vera Searle, both athletes and administrators and Dorette Nelson Neil. See also John Rodda, ‘Wisdom on the track: Obituary of Marea Hartman’, Guardian, August 31, 1994, 11; Arthur Gold, ‘Obituary: Dame Marea Hartman’, Independent, August 31, 1994, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dame-marea-hartman-1379701.html (accessed December 2, 2018).
100 Schweinbenz, ‘Paddling Against the Current’, offers some biographical detail largely obtained through interview, as does Smalman-Smith, ‘Rowing Story: Penny Chuter’, https://rowingstory.com/people/penny-chuter (accessed July 27, 2018).
101 Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 144.
102 Nicholson provides evidence of post-war female cricketers pursuing the sport as athletes, but not as coaches, despite their domestic responsibilities (‘Like a man trying to knit’, 172–6).
103 In senior rowing administration, but not in coaching, the two chairs of the ARA from 1989 until 2018, Dame Di Ellis (née Hall, 1938–2016) and Annamarie Phelps (née Stapleton, 1966–), were both married with children. Ellis served as chair from 1989 to 2013 and Phelps from 2013 to 2018.
104 See Fiona Skillen and Carol Osborne, ‘It’s Good to Talk: Oral History, Sports History and Heritage’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 32, no. 15 (2015): 1883–98 for a discussion of the application of oral history to sport history.
105 See for example Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (London: Routledge, 1991); Joan Sangster, ‘Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History’, in The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 87–100; Joanna Bornat and Hanna Diamond, ‘Women’s History and Oral History: Developments and Debates’, Women’s History Review 16, no. 1 (2007): 19–39. The roots of oral history in the early 1970s aligned with a greater appetite for more radical approaches to history and the social sciences.
106 See Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 19–60, 82–6.
107 Such criticisms of the methodology have been defended by influential practitioners such as Portelli as its strength. See Alessandro Portelli, ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’, History Workshop 12 (1981): 96–107.
108 See Alistair Thomson, ‘Anzac Memories: Putting Popular Memory Theory into Practice in Australia’, in The Oral History Reader, 300–310. Thomson’s reminder that oral history represents an interaction of public and private, and of memory and identity, has important implications for how narrators locate themselves in the stories they tell, at the point of telling them.
109 Day and Carpenter, A History of Sports Coaching in Britain, 3.
110 Nicole M. LaVoi, Women in Sports Coaching (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 1–9 stakes a claim for the timeliness of the issue and lays out a ‘comprehensive, empirical’ agenda. She offers an overview of the key findings already explored in literature around women and coaching. The volume of literature on women in coaching is increasing, and being approached from increasingly diverse critical angles, but it is not a new area of enquiry. See for example Nancy Theberge, ‘The Construction of Gender in Sport: Women, Coaching, and the Naturalization of Difference’, Social Problems 40, no. 3 (1993): 301–13.
111 Carol Osborne and Fiona Skillen, ‘Forum: Women in Sport’, Women’s History Review 25, no. 5 (2015): 655–61 offers a more optimistic appraisal of the field than ‘The State of Play: Women in British Sport History’, Sport in History 30, no. 2 (2010): 189–95 five years earlier, and scholarship in women’s sport history continues to grow in breadth and depth.
112 Day and Carpenter, A History of Sports Coaching in Britain, 3.
113 Female representation in elite rowing coaching, for example, remains minimal: at the time of writing in 2018, GB Rowing, the high performance arm of the sport in Britain, has only one female coach on its senior coaching team: Jane Hall, who was appointed in 2017. This imbalance is neither unique to rowing, nor likely to be the sole consequence of a lack of female talent. See for example Leanne Norman, ‘The UK Coaching System is Failing Women Coaches’, International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching 3, no. 4 (2008): 447–76.
114 See for example John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).