The 1926 Women’s World Games in Gothenburg: A Breakthrough for Women?
Claes Annerstedt School of Sport Science, Department of Education, University of Gothenburg
Karin Grahn School of Sport Science, Department of Education, University of Gothenburg
Natalie Barker-Ruchti Institute of Exercise and Health Sciences, University of Basel
The Second Women’s World Games were held in Gothenburg in 1926 with competitors from ten nations taking part in the event. The contest was initiated and organized by the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI) and was the second competition in what was first called the ‘Women’s Olympics’. The FSFI was formed in 1921 in response to its unsuccessful efforts to bring women's athletics into the Olympic program. Although negative attitudes from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) about women and the Olympics were voiced, the 1920s can be seen as a breakthrough period for women’s sports.
The overall purpose of the project is to analyze three key research questions relevant to the Second Women’s World Games: a) What discourses do the newspaper cartoons, photographs and textual descriptions, as well as the film material reflect?; b) What social discourses do the photographs from a private collection reflect and how do they compare with the contents of the newspaper articles?; and c) How did the World Women’s Games influence the assimilation of the FSFI into the IAAF?
A theoretical lens that is Foucauldian and critical feminist in nature is adopted. Within this framework, knowledges and practices are assumed embedded in and constructed through discursive networks of power relations, which shape cultural aspects and mentalities, political processes, as well as individual assumptions and practices. This triad of knowledge, power relations and the individual is neither fixed nor constant; rather, the interactions are continuously being (re-)iterated. They represent a struggle, through which dominant knowledges and practices emerge, are transformed, become less important and vanish. For this project, this lens is seen to provide an analytics that helps explain the competing discourses that were present and contested during the 1920s, and the 1926 Women’s Games in particular.
The project’s research questions are answered by employing critical textual and visual analysis techniques. Articles from seven major Swedish newspapers that reported on the games, personal accounts from women competing in the games, as well as a private collection of event photographs (70 photos), approximately 40 minutes of film material from the games (Swedish Television Company) and minutes from meetings by the IOC, the IAAF, the FSFI and the Swedish Women´s Sports Federation are analyzed. Examples of preliminary interpretations are included in the presentation.
