krls204 4. victorian era

victorian era

• Queen Victoria (period when queen victoria was ruling (64 yrs). 1837-1901)

  • Monarch of the British Empire

  • Anglo-Protestant values dominated emergent forms of modern British S&L (sport+leisure)

• Canada’s Confederation as a nation

  • British North America Act (1867):

  • canada is now a british state. beginning of CA as a modern nation under th british empire

  • “Peace, order and good government”

• Nation and Empire Building

  • Canadian Imperialist Nationalism

    • Canada contributed to greatness of Empire

    • Canada’s triumphs Britain’s too

  • S&L as signs of greatness and pride

victorian cities

• High immigration & urbanization

  • Rapid (urban) growth of population and industrial cities

  • Poor health conditions

    • crowding, disease, smog, poor working conditions, high infant mortality, unpasturized milk, dirty water (esp bad cause there were no vaccs yet), limited housing, living in close proximity to animals. poor health was esp bad for work and living and was the norma for a while

• Social stratification (class, ancestry, sex)

  • Elites, middle classes, working classes and the working poor

    • remained poor because they could never advance

• Political System: “laissez-faire” capitalism

  • Competition, free enterprise, individualism, self reliance, thrift; ‘public good’ relied on charity

  • Few social services (E.G. church, poor house, jail) and facilities)

  • anglobritish, french canadaian and other western europeans were main population and took over indigenous. language also affected the pyramid

• Cultural Life: metropolitan cities

  • RW, telegraph, newspapers, libraries, concert halls, museums, sport facilities, entertainment

early 19th century: elite sport life

Montreal Curling Club (est. 1807):

• Canada’s 1st sporting club

• Scottish merchants

• “How social the game and how manly”

• only men, mascot is a dog

• women is on the sidelines crowded together, unable to participate

early 19th century

• Montreal, c. early 1800s

  • “The cradle of Canadian sport”

  • But whose sport?

• “Sport” mainly for male social elites

  • British business & officer classes

  • Access to time, $, space for phys. rec.

  • Elite schools & colleges for boys/men → cultural reproduction → SLH practices

• Elite British gentlemen’s sports & ethics

  • Hunt, cricket, tandem, “racquet clubs”

  • Sport form: irregular, challenge-based games, variable informal rules for time & space; social access to time/land use

  • British sport & games ethics: fair play

paris crew 1867

• Canadian Heritage Minute mini doc film

• Rowing regattas, New Brunswick team

• July 1867 Paris Exposition rowing match

• 1867 won in Paris, vs Oxford and London Rowing Club teams

• 1868 Won World Championships in USA

• Seen to unite a new nation as “our fellow countrymen in name and in fact”

late 19th century: middle class sport life

• Rise of urban middle class c. 1870

  • “Gentlemen” with “a sense of order”

  • Respectable social leaders in Victorian cities

    • Professional & business classes (e.g. doctors)

    • Efficient sport organizers (e.g. Royal Imperial Bank of Canada’s hockey team)

• Q: How did they apply a Victorian sense of business efficiency to managing S&L?

  • holding meetings, rules, being organized, good networking and good communication

• Made their preferred rec. into the most popular sports & games (Kidd, 1997 p. 15); codification & diffusion

• Thus upsurge in number of clubs, rules, leagues, standardization

• montreal lacrosse club est. 1856

montreal lacrosse club est. 1856

• “Modern Lacrosse” and George Beers

  • Montreal dentist, “father” of lacrosse

  • Codified written rules for lacrosse 1860

  • Campaigned for Canada’s “national game”

    • cricket was too british, but lacrosse was just right! by confederation of CA, lacrosse as a CA sport was on the way to being fufilled!

  • Canadian show teams toured Britain 1876/83

late 19th century: 1881 montreal amateur athletic association (MAAA) was founded by three clubs:

• Montreal Snowshoe Club (Toques Bleu), est.1840

• Montreal Lacrosse Club, est. 1856

• Montreal Bicycle Club, est. circa 1878

• Shared gymnasium space on Mansfield Street

• Organized Montreal Winter Carnivals in 1880s

late 19th century:

• Amateur Athletic Association of Canada

  • AAA (est. 1884): Amateur sports umbrella organization founded in bigger cities (e.g. Montreal, Toronto); members were men and middle class

  • Governed track and field, gymnastics, handball, fencing, wrestling, etc. (Bruce Kidd, 1997, p. 22)

• Trend toward sport bureaucracy/formalization

  • Claiming “national” governing status in metropols

  • Standardization (game rules, boundaries, clock, scheds, etc.); formal structure, conformity; timed by clock and calendar, modern time measures; control

• Amateur Athletic Union of Canada:

  • AAA evolved into AAUC est. 1909

  • Canada’s major national sports governing body

late 19th century: the new trend

The new urban middle class fostered a trend toward institutionalizing sport

origins and institutionalization of modern history

• Indigenous practices; British soldiers, played stick- and-ball games on ice in early 19th-century Canada

• James Creighton: varsity amateur athlete

  • Played at Dalhousie (Halifax) and McGill (Montreal)

  • Originated game of hockey codified according to

    • 1875 McGill Rules had begun as the Halifax Rules

    • Rules drew from rugby-football and lacrosse

• 1879 McGill University Hockey Club

  • first organized hockey team

• 1883 first “world championship” hockey

  • played at Montreal’s Winter Carnival organized by MAAA

• 1886 Amateur Hockey Association of Canada

  • first national association with representatives from cities of Québec, Montréal, and Ottawa

new urban sport and culture

• “new urban sporting culture” reflected and generated “bourgeois assumptions about respectable leisure”

• "In the cities, new forms of organized sporting activity…emerged to supplant or modify those traditional preindustrial sporting activities which. involved close association between humans and animals. It is worth noting…the organized sporting culture that developed alongside the new industrial capitalist order would never completely extinguish sporting practices such as hunting, fishing, horse racing, rodeo, mountaineering, sailing, canoeing, and various aboriginal games.” (Howell, 2001, 10-11)

ideologies of sport and leisure

• rational recreation (RR)

• amateurism

• paternalism

ideologies of sport and leisure: rational recreation (RR)

Idleness conflicted with Protestant work ethic and beliefs “idle hands made for devil’s work”

• RR was a doctrine that promoted the productive, self-improving use of leisure time

• Respectable and morally uplifting activity

• Learning/producing something of moral value through recreation

• Recreation to serve a higher purpose, ie. developing citizens to serve their stations in life

• E.G. natural history, playing dolls, playing team sports, gardening, public libraries, popular science lectures, charity work, playing game of chess

why were young boys encouraged to play team sports?

ideas of masculinity, teamwork, discipline, benefits of hard labour, collaboration + stoicism, learning skills that can be used in other aspects of life (work, businessmen, family, military, survival, etc.)

• e.g., learning how to grow fruits and vegetables can be useful for sustenance, libraries to learn and self improve, PLAYING CHESS to build social contacts, work their brain + work on strategy/critical thinking

ideologies of sport and leisure: amateurism

Ideology promoting involvement in S&L for the love of it, not for money or material gain. “Amateur” used to mean “love”!

• Amateur clubs and governing organizations set amateur codes that defined amateur status as a mark of class distinction

  • E.G. Montreal Pedestrian Club 1873

  • Institutionalized segregation by class/sex/ethnicity...

    • at first very exclusive, only for the elite / those who could do sport without pay / other restrictions. excludes those who use sport to make money / a living. many working class athletes who wanted to make money to live were restricted by this

  • Rules against “pay for play”

    • taking money for sport was vulgar, and just not right. if players paid to win, some might also pay to lose

• Functioned to reinforce social hierarchy through sport by inclusion/exclusion (who could/not play)

• Moralist doctrine that amateur sport was pure sport in its finest form, contrasted to professional sport as vulgar and corrupt

ideologies of sport and leisure: paternalism

‘Fatherly’ control over others, supposedly in their best interests

• Yet authority tends to patronize others; e.g. doctors kept women out of sport to protect the “weaker sex”

• basically “father knows best” attitudes towards their employees / citizens. can have good intentions but can also just be oppressive / confining

After 1870s…

• Sports were no longer limited to social elites in Canada

• Urban middle classes defined sport and reshaped it according to their values. This outlook was institutionalized by organizations that governed sport and leisure.

• It determined who could and could not play according to their rules, structures, and ideologies.

women and workers

• What about people who weren’t middle-class urban men in Canada?

• Women and workers were on the fringes of amateur sport because:

  • Women and workers were not “gentlemen amateurs”

  • Boundaries of gender and class

• Did they fit into respectable rational recreation or sport?

the victorian lady: myth of female frailty

Women as “weaker sex” with “deviant body”

• moral physiology (Helen Lenskyj)

  • Pseudo science based on morality and social/cultural expectations regarding females

    • also lacked advances in physio and study of women’s bodies, which didn’t help our ability to play lmao

  • Social Darwinism and Eugenics

    • darwinism also emerging at this time, and his evidence of evolution was applied as “social darwinism”

    • SOCIAL DARWINISM = argued that the "fittest" (wealthy, powerful) should thrive while the "weak" (poor, marginalized) decline, justifying inequality, racism, imperialism, and laissez-faire capitalism through ideas like "survival of the fittest

  • Assumed weakness of women, led to restrictions

• Fashion: corsets, health, and helplessness

  • corsets were so tight that it led to digestive problems, difficulty breathing, childbirth issues, dependency on the corset to keep their backs straight due to muscle atrophy

the victorian lady: middle class ideals of femininity

• Domestic role, “angel in the house,” status

  • romanticized ideals. victorian lady was assumed to be respectable and quite feminine. some activiites were considered respected and others were not

• Beauty, faith, morality, and respectability

1886 amateur hockey association of canada

first national association; reps from Quebec City, Montréal, and Ottawa

1890 ontario hockey association

est. by group of colleges, universities, and military and athletic clubs

1894 queen’s u women’s hockey team

Game Institutionalized, codified & expanded across Canada and to the US ivy league

not ladies…

• Women who diverged from the norms: athlete Louise Armaindo, Montreal professional cyclist, c. 1882

• Middle-class ideals out of reach for many yet perpetuated gender notions of Victorian womanhood

  • E.G. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

working classes

• Trade union politics & leisure

  • Promoted workers’ solidarity

  • Anti-Sabbatarian: rec on Sundays ok

  • Union picnic as S & L: co-workers & families

• Popular entertainments & practices

  • Sunday races, circuses, “rough sport,” blood sports, prize fights (e.g., dog and cock fighitng), taverns; games, malls, beach, parks; socials, family time, church

  • 1870 federal laws banned blood sports & prize fights in Canada; continued illegally

• Working-class culture and world views; different than m. class.

hegemony

Ongoing process to achieve social control through dominance

• Antonio Gramsci: focused on how societies hold together by apparent consent despite obvious class/ethnic inequalities

• Elites establish dominance & position of “moral & intellectual leadership”

• Making systems of meaning and values into “common sense” that serves to justify inequalities or status quo; functions through lived practices of everyday life

• Not that everyone identifies with one way of thinking, but dominant meanings limit alternative meanings & practices which offer resistance to the dominant (ongoing tension)

• Politicizes thinking about culture & history.

1845

holiday for public employees in Canada West, with local option by town council

1901

Queen Victoria died; National holiday est.; end of Victorian era