Sport and Spectacle in the Greek Bronze Age

e (including bull-catching, bull-leaping, and bull-sacrifice), Minoan and Mycenaean frescoes, vase paintings, and stone relief vases depict boxing and wrestling, and competitions with special clothing, protective gloves, and physical restraints or handicaps. Less well known are the depictions of archers, foot-racers, and acrobats. Competition may arguably include artistic representations of game boards and gaming, dance performances, and processions, and descriptions of poetry and musical contests in Homer and Hesiod and of discus throwing in mythology. There is also architectural evidence for enclosing the central courts in the Minoan palaces for protection and seating of spectators. Depictions on eighth-century-bce pottery testify to chariot-racing, musical performances, horsemanship, and the hunt. We also consider passim the participation of women in sport and competition, drawing upon Aegean Bronze Age representations of women archers, hunters, and charioteers, and upon classical mythology for their participation in early foot-races, wrestling, and the hunt.

Sport Ireland Women In Sport

The challenges facing women and girls in sport have a long history and many interventions to address these challenges have occurred over the years. It is well documented that these challenges no longer simply apply to female’s active participation in sport and physical activity but through all aspects of the sporting landscape, i.e. coaching, officiating, leadership, governance and visibility. Though time has seen improvements naturally, Sport Ireland financial support and dedicated women in sport programmes developed as a result have had positive impacts which are explored in this paper.Using information gathered through the work of Sport Ireland, its databases, commissioned reports, dedicated policies and via reports from National Governing Bodies and Local Sports Partnerships, this paper provides a more detailed insight into the history of the Sport Ireland Women in Sport programme as well as other areas that impact women and girls in sport. It tracks the evolution of the programme since the inception of funding in 2005 to how it is managed today, as well as outlining some of Sport Ireland’s current Women in Sport (WiS) projects. In order to give a full overview, information is also contained on the history of funding allocated to female High Performance athletes in Ireland. Since the establishment of funding in 2005, the WiS programme set out to, and has successfully, reduced the gap in sports participation levels between men and women. It has now grown to much more than a participation programme with the launch of a policy providing strategic direction to ensure women have equal opportunity across all areas of sport. Now the same attention and commitment is shifting to coaching, officiating, leadership, governance and visibility. The availability of funding for women in sport is an important feature of the Sport Ireland Women in Sport programme. With over €22m awarded to date, NGBs, LSPs and women and girls in society will continue to benefit from monetary grants received. While it is acknowledged that there is a lot more to do to ensure parity amongst males and females in the sporting landscape, it is the view that the work of Sport Ireland through its WiS programme continues to benefit society and is making grounds in areas where inequality, might still occur.

Challenging the nice girl

Louise Nealon is a writer from county Kildare. She plays corner back for her local camogie club, Cappagh GAA. This piece based on a presentation given at a conference entitled, Sidelines, Touchlines and Hemlines: Irish Women in Sport, in Dundalk County Museum on February 2020.

Honour and Shame in Women’s Sports

This piece, first delivered as a keynote address, examines the role of honour and shame in understanding the many stories of women's involvement in sport in Ireland from the eighteenth century onwards, and especially in the modern era. While women's sporting involvement was regarded as shameful, especially in those sports imbued with traditional associated masculine norms, the prospect for women's sports is different today than in the past. Yet the struggle for honour is ongoing, seen in topical debates concerning gender quotas and the recommendations made by the Citizens Assembly on gender equality. Bringing the analysis up to date, the piece outlines ad hoc policy initiatives around gender equality in sport from the mid-2000s (in which the author was centrally involved) to the publication of the first formal statutory policy on women in sport, in 2019. Here it is argued that the guilt and shame of previous generations has influenced the public debate on gender quotas and it is as if, in the desire for perceived equality, the current generation of sportswomen do not wish to be associated with quotas. In this way, honour is conflated with merit. The piece concludes by suggesting that merit is honourable, personally, but equally, quotas are by no means shameful in public struggles.

From Novelty Act to National Association: The Emergence of Ladies’ Gaelic Football in the 1970s

In 1967 a county Cork farmer wrote to the Sunday Independent (Dublin) to express his hope that the Gaelic Athletic Association (G.A.A.) would ban women from attending the upcoming All-Ireland finals. The G.A.A is a male-only organisation, he argued, and the presence of women at Croke Park would take up ‘valuable space’. His letter generated many outraged responses from both men and women, all arguing against his opinion and illustrating that women played a vital role within the sporting community—whether as supporters, sandwich-makers or jersey-washers. The responses highlighted how people in Ireland were reconsidering the role of women in the public sphere more generally in the late 1960s. The emergence of ladies’ Gaelic football as a ‘serious’ sport for women in the 1970s is reflective of this changing society. Current Irish sports historiography is considerably lacking in its examination of the space women occupied in modern sport in Ireland. This piece will draw on newspapers and archival material to examine the emergence of what came to be known as ladies’ Gaelic football in the late 1960s and early 1970s and to analyse the debates about the changing position of women in sport and society at this time. In so doing, this piece will aim to bring the historiography of women in Irish society in conversation with the growing historiography on sport in Ireland.