Throughout the week, we explored the topic of “Public and Private Canada” and discussed Recreation and Sport in Canadian Life. Within recreation and sport in Canadian life, we have multiple sports such as cycling, boxing, and hockey. All of these sports and recreational activities deal with manhood and masculinity in this first half of the twentieth century Canada, which is shown through the articles we were assigned to read this week. In Kevin Wamsley and David Whitson’s article, “Celebrating Violent Masculinities: The Boxing Death of Luther McCarthy”, the article explains how boxing is a sport that depicts masculinity and how violence contributes to sports. “Champions in confrontative sports became popular exemplars of a rough version of masculinity that was still respected”[1]. In the first half of the 1900s, “manliness… defined a particular middle-class kind of masculinity, and boxing was considered to offer important socialization for youths into many ideals, habits, and norms of courage”[2]. Violence in sports had a close relationship with masculinity, it was “necessary for men to dominate opponents by force and violence”[3]. These topics are echoed in the article “‘Talk About Strenuous Hockey’: Violence, Manhood, and the 1907 Ottawa Silver Seven-Montreal Wanderer Rivalry” written by Stacy Lorenz and Geraint Osborne. Lorenz and Osborne explain how playing the sport of hockey shows not only masculinity, but also how closely violence is linked in. Hockey was considered to be “brutal butchery” and “strenuous spectacle” which “portrayed violence as a part of an absorbing, aggressive, masculine display”[4]. “The danger, physicality, and competitiveness of [hockey] also cultivated and reinforced standards of passionate manhood and primitive masculinity”[5]. It was noted that sports and leisure activity required a “certain level of manly roughness”[6]. Both articles by Wamsley and Whitson, and Lorenz and Osborne deal with violence in sports as a way of showing one’s masculinity. However, in Robert Kossuth and Kevin Wamsley’s article “Cycles of Manhood: Pedaling Respectability in Ontario’s Forest City”, the article explains the respectable manhood of cycling with no link to violence. “Men who made the ranks of early cyclists… were brawn almost exclusively from the wealthier middle classes. These mostly young men engaged in recreational and competitive cycling”[7]. “Cycling invoked a measure of… masculine daring, similar to that found on the rugby pitch… Cyclists could be manly yet respectable, conforming to acceptable and rational masculine behaviours that were expected of young gentlemen of [this] time”[8] and they could show “these masculine ideals within the setting of [a] bicycle club”[9]. Even though violence was not a factor in cycling, masculinity was still portrayed throughout this sport but in a more respectable civilized manner.
All three articles contributed to the main topic “Public and Private Canada” with more of a focus on Recreation and Sport in Canadian Life. All the readings deal with the idea of masculinity in sports and recreational activities such as boxing, hockey, and cycling. However, it is shown that violence can be closely linked to sports and masculinity, and in contrast, respectability also can contribute to masculinity. These topics not only impacted the first half of the twentieth century, but ultimately contributes to the wider historiography of the main topic “Public and Private Canada”.
Endnotes:
[1] Walmsley and Whitson, “Celebrating Violent Masculinities: The Boxing Death of Luther McCarty,” Journal of Sport History, 25, 3 (Fall, 1998): 420.
[2] Ibid., 421.
[3] Ibid., 420.
[4] Lorenz and Osborne, “‘Talk About Strenuous Hockey’: Violence, Manhood, and the 1907 Ottawa Silver Seven-Montreal Wanderer Rivalry,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 40, 1 (Winter, 2006): 125.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 130.
[7] Kossuth and Walmsley, “Cycles of Manhood: Pedaling Respectability in Ontario’s Forest City,” Sport History Review, 34 (2003): 169.
[8] Ibid., 170.
[9] Ibid., 180.
Bibliography:
Kossuth and Walmsley. “Cycles of Manhood: Pedaling Respectability in Ontario’s Forest City.” Sport History Review, 34 (2003): 168-189.
Lorenz and Osborne. “‘Talk About Strenuous Hockey’: Violence, Manhood, and the 1907 Ottawa Silver Seven-Montreal Wanderer Rivalry.” Journal of Canadian Studies, 40, 1 (Winter, 2006): 125-456.
Walmsley and Whitson. “Celebrating Violent Masculinities: The Boxing Death of Luther McCarty.” Journal of Sport History, 25, 3 (Fall, 1998): 419-431.
