This thesis examines the struggle for equal gender representation in the Olympic swimming and athletics arena. It investigates the relationship in participation and representation between men and women in athletics and swimming from the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio de Janeiro in 2016. When the modern Olympic Games resumed in 1896, they had been recreated by a group of privileged men. These men had created a forum for the aristocratic masculine world and initially had no intention of including women in their creation. The contemporaries around the turn of the century in 1900 considered women to be weak, inappropriate and that femininity was the exact opposite of everything that the masculine competitive sport represented. Muscle, fitness and sweat were not something that the weak female bodies would be associated with. Man was created for the public sphere and woman for the home domains. The sports movement was a mirror of the prevailing privileged upper-class society and came to conform to the prevailing social and culturally constructed norms that were prevalent in the meantime. The women made a first breakthrough in the masculine sports sphere in the early 20th century and then they managed to make a real breakthrough in the 1920s. This created concern among the privileged men. Should women athletes change in a more masculine direction, would they even lose interest in traditional female responsibilities such as home and family formation? The struggle for equal representation continued throughout the 20th century and only in connection with the feminine radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s as a real change did it begin to be seen again in the Olympic competition arenas and only after the turn of the millennium has real equality regarding representation been achieved. In this thesis, I have studied the athletics and swimming women inclusion to into the Olympic space. I spotlight how the two sports have developed from an equality and gender equality point of view. My survey prove a clear connection and have put figures on men and women's participation and demonstrated inequalities in the Olympic space.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-45764 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Lindberg, Thomas |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Historia |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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