抄録
A history of women’s sports explored through certain linear explanation disregards the context of the various routes for developing and explaining the process of the emancipation and produces many historical inconsistencies. In order to dissolve such contradictions in a synthesis, this paper shed a light on the plural channels towards the liberation, the transnational coincidence and the ramified genderbiased spaces for women’s sports in Britain. In particular, the recent studies attempted by researchers such as Jennifer Hargreaves and Jean Williams can be summarized as follows: the physical exercises of girls and women in Britain partly during the 1890s varied with social class, education and early work experiences. These varied activities may be gathered into the following five principal types: ‘Games played in the gardens of middle-class homes’, ‘Organized games played in the middle-class schools at game clubs and lunchtime’, ‘Games played by young adults at working-class factory clubs after World War I when munitions-factory clubs for women were at an increased value’, ‘Genderbiased exclusive sports’, ‘Physical education at schools in which callisthenics, Swedish exercises and musical gymnastics were taught with regular physical examinations’. What E.P. Hughes who was the first principal of the Cambridge Training College (C.T.C.), introduced to Japan during her stay in the period of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance were those physical activities identical to the second and the last categories. It is worth considering the process of introducing them to Japanese society as both their transmission and reception were sensitive to the prevalent ideologies in Britain and Japan in the period between the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. It reflects the aspect of inventing a tradition of both Japanese women’s and men’s ideal that was originally influenced by the values of the British middle class and the fact that early feminism was trapped within imperialistic ideology.
