The Girl and the Game: A History of Women's Sport in Canada

Janet Money is a writer and policy analyst for the Canadian Cystic
Fibrosis Foundation in Toronto.

Exhaustive but by no means exhausting, this history of women’s sport
in Canada is far more than a list of highlights. Setting her narrative
in a feminist context, the author shows how women athletes in the 20th
century managed to rise above obstacles (sexual innuendo,
trivialization, etc.) that were often imposed by the mass media. She
looks at the golden age of women’s sports in the 1920s; the backlash
that emerged in the 1930s, in the form of charges that elite competition
for women would prove damaging to the “fairer sex”; the “Barbara
Ann Scott girl-next-door” phenomenon that persisted through the 1940s
and 1950s; and the impact of feminism in the 1970s and beyond.

Hall also examines the presentation of women athletes and their
achievements as somehow both admirable and freakish, as well as the
ongoing controversy over whether sex-separate sports are preferable to
sex-integrated sports. Her book is at once a valuable resource and an
interesting read.