Abstract
This thesis examines the rapid expansion of women’s team sports at the turn of the twentieth century and how advocates of team sports adapted their marketing and the rules of the sports to conform to narrowly defined concepts of female respectability. It is true that individual sports like cycling, tennis, and golf also incurred censure from middle-class moralists; however, I argue that team sports constitute a fundamentally different mode that warrants specific investigation. In the early 1900s, proponents modified the language they used to describe the benefits of team sports to emphasize sports as a health intervention. Still, for the first three decades of the twentieth century, the public debated whether there was a place for competition in femininity. In the 1920s and 1930s, the decline of the women’s movement and rise of conservatism forced team sport advocates to drastically alter team sports so that sports could maintain a place in a respectable woman’s life.