When I was seven I asked my parents if I was allowed to play hockey. While I didn’t understand it as such at the time, this was a political move that challenged conventional wisdom. Girls played netball – but I didn’t want to. The courts were small, I couldn’t run with the ball, there was a constant sound of a whistle, and there were strict rules about where I could go on the court.
In netball I would, quite literally, be made to stay in my place. Fortunately for me, my parents did not care about conventional wisdom and so I was allowed to play a game that required me to smack a ball, and gave me more freedom to roam.
The history of netball explained.
Most of my female peers made a different choice; they signed up for netball in droves. And this wasn’t a passing trend – females continue to be over-represented in netball participation rates.
This might not seem to be a particularly insightful or troubling observation, but some of the most important research questions are found in the taken-for-granted aspects of daily life. So why is netball so popular with one sex, and with what effects for equality more broadly?
A feminist question, rather than a solution
While netball history is not very well documented, in a current research project my colleagues and I are undertaking with Netball Victoria we have found many reasons to celebrate netball.
Initially it was a game played in girls’ schools, and was taught by British school mistresses. By the 1930s it was booming, and fast becoming a symbol of female emancipation – as it was largely played, and controlled, by women. In oral history interviews we’ve heard about the roles women played in organising a sport with feminist principles – for example in the 1970s the “Married Ladies League” ran on a schedule where the team with the bye would take child-sitting duties that week.
We have discovered evidence of correspondence to the Sun newspaper in the 1930s bemoaning the lack of press coverage given to netball. And in the archives there are many albums with photographs celebrating the physicality of netball – females jumping, stretching, shooting.
Caitlin Bassett of Australia competes for the ball with Vangelee Williams of Jamaica in 2015. AAP Image/Dean Lewins
There is no doubt that netball has played an important role in the lives of many Australian girls and women, and some men. However, my prime concern as a researcher is to understand the social and historical forces that shape personal choices and experiences (positive and not so positive).
So we need to look a bit deeper and more critically at the forces that shaped the growth and popularity of netball before concluding that this game marked progress for women in terms of the transformation of gender norms and conventions. To this end we need to turn our attention to the 1920s.
This decade was an incredibly rich period in the history of women’s sport in Australia, with a huge increase in participation in formally organised competitions; an article in the Sporting Globe in 1923 included the caption. “All sports popular with the fair sex”.
Within this context, netball wasn’t born out of a political attempt to encourage women into sport and transgress the limits of sex, but actually to discourage them from playing rough “manly” sports, like hockey.
Netball was seen as an appropriate sport for females – they could be physically active whilst exercising feminine restraint – and it was promoted at the expense of other more physically demanding sports that so many of the 1920s “new women” were beginning to excel at, and enjoy.
This somewhat contradictory and discontinuous history challenges the assumption that social conventions about gender operate in a progressive, linear fashion. It’s not the case that as we go further back in time we find more restrictive ideas about what women could and should do with their bodies.
And it’s certainly not true that netball paved the way for women to play other more physically demanding sports. While netball has transformed over the decades, and there is no denying the athleticism of elite netballers, for me, netball remains a feminist question, rather than a solution.
Highlights from the 2015 ANZ Championship final.
When the Firebirds line up against the Swifts this weekend, we should ask why netball garners a greater following than other women’s sports in Australia? Why are we less fanatical about those sports where females can smack balls, and have more freedom to roam?
* Blog first published within a larger piece on The Conversation in 2016.