"Straight Ahead and Over Everything:" Women and Equestrian Sports in Britain, 1772-1956

My dissertation explores the impact of women's participation in horse sports on gender norms, imperial ideology, and national identity in Britain over the long nineteenth century. Using rarely utilized sources such as riding manuals, sporting periodicals, and memoirs of Empire, I trace equestrian activities from fox-hunting to show-jumping, polo to pig-sticking. Though by riding sidesaddle women were made distinct and separate from male riders, the style actually facilitated their entry into the public sphere via sport. In full glare of the public gaze, women riders became either admired or admonished, respectable or risible, based on their own skills and power. At a time when the ideal Victorian woman was exhorted to exude domestic bliss within the home, female equestrians appeared to be the very opposite of what prescriptive literature demanded. Yet they transformed public opinion by making the masculine qualities fostered by riding - independence, self-possession, and capability - into positive feminine attributes. Female riders in Britain had created a "new woman" before there was the "new woman." Such confidence and flexibility also served them well around the British Empire. Here women revised not only social and cultural norms about domesticity and femininity, but they also transformed sport by abandoning the traditional sidesaddle for the man's cross-saddle in order to better pursue imperial activities such as polo and pig-sticking. In riding this way and adopting masculine sporting attire (literally wearing the breeches), women revolutionized gender construction, promoting a femininity not based on outward appearance but inward qualities. This imperial femininity significantly affected gender ideals within Britain, and well before the First World War or the achievement of the vote, female equestrians had achieved an important non-political equality that resulted in the transformation of conventional social and cultural values.