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Sport and Culture Seminar
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Media Contact: Dana Navarro
October 7, 2008 (773) 442-4227
d-navarro@neiu.edu
Female Sport Hunters Used to Revive Recreational Hunting at the Beginning of the 20th Century
WHAT: Dr. Andrea Smalley, instructor, history, at Northern Illinois University, will discuss her doctoral dissertation in a lecture titled “Modern Diana: Women and the Making of Sport Hunting” as part of the Newberry Library’s Chicago Seminar on Sport and Culture, which is sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University.
In the closing decades of the 19th century, sport hunting appeared doomed both by declining wildlife populations and by widespread public criticism of hunters and their methods. Responding to these challenges, outdoor writers spotlighted female hunters and linked their feminine qualities to recreational hunting, thus providing the most visible marker of difference between legitimate field sports and the other forms of wildlife killing that sportsmen wanted to prohibit.
This paper contests the notion that hunting and masculinity were commonplace by arguing that hunting advocates feminized recreational hunting as part of a turn-of-the-century project to reform the sport’s public image.
WHERE: Newberry Library
80 W. Walton in Chicago
WHEN: Friday, October 17 at 3:30 p.m.
DETAILS: Dr. Smalley also has studied women’s participation in sport hunting from the late 19th century to the 1970s, and her articles on this topic have appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and in Gender and History. Copies of the paper will be available to attendees prior to the lecture upon request. For more information, contact Steve Riess at (773) 442-5631 or s-riess@neiu.edu.
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