Introduction

The scare idea that men with in the early twentieth century should be bread winners continued to wreak havoc upon social society, due to the stress placed on them to perform duties without help from a spouse. “It is misleading to think of females as temporary income earners and males as workers who stayed at a job permanently.”[1] Why this is important idea is important is because it shows a real situation faced by families within Canada and it shows that many imposed ideas of what a family should be like do not actually work, therefore one can ascertain that this system was almost doomed to fail at the beginning due to its limits created by upper class citizens in top percentile jobs.  This idea of a man being the only care giver was perpetuated from the middle class citizens who were also responsible for creating a similar idea that only men should have social lives, and these social lives would contain activities that could be considered respectable and emphasized their manliness. Some of these activities would later become sports casted, while retaining their original dangerous roots. Boxing is one such example of a dangerous sport were “Luther McCarty was the first boxer to be killed in a boxing ring in Canada.”[2] These fights did in fact show a characteristic that “showed off” manliness. Were the strongest fighters were always men, however this idea for being the strongest and manliest was meant to get women’s attention. In other such cases some sports would evolve more quickly into a unisexual environment. These sports were more generally related to being softer on a women’s “delicate/ frail body,” But even these sports were met with resistance from the general populace prior, and it was only the middle and upper class women that were able to participate in such events due to their husband’s accumulated wealth. As shared in another article “ The large-scale entry of women into cycling in Britain and North America is commonly linked to the development of the safety bicycle in the early 1890s.”[3] As stated before most women were not allowed to participate due to the fear that if they participated in sports they would become unable to have children. But with these improvements it allowed women to explore more on these two wheeled leisure vehicles.

[1] Frager, Ruth A., and Carmela Patrias. 2005. Discounted labour : women workers in Canada, 1870-1939. n.p.: Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2005, 36.

[2] Walmsley and Whitson, “Celebrating Violent Masculinities: The Boxing Death of Luther McCarty,” Journal of Sport History, 25, 3 (Fall, 1998): 424.

[3] Kossuth and Walmsley, “Cycles of Manhood: Pedaling Respectability in Ontario’s Forest City,” Sport History Review, 34 (2003): 181.