Dressed for the Field: Gender, Bodies, and Society through the Material Culture of Field Hockey, 1880 to the present.

Women's field hockey emerged during the late 19th when sporting culture for women was motivated by health and education (Watson, 2016). It grew from a 'fashionable country-house and holiday game' to being played by upper-middle-class women in universities from the 1870s and subsequently developed through schools, clubs and other institutions. Specifically, in 1887, the first-known private club, Molesey Ladies, was formed and in 1895 the All England Women's Hockey Association was established with over 52 affiliated clubs (Hargreaves, 1994).

Despite this history, the women's Olympic competition was not included until 1980 whilst the men's competition was a permanent feature from the 1928 games.

Historiography of women's hockey includes Jennifer Hargreave's feminist study of sports, Sarah Juggins sports journalism on recent competitions as well as sport history journal articles on the development of women's hockey leagues (Halpin, 2017) and team international tours (Watson, 2016). However, writing on hockey clothing has been pushed clothing to the margins and therefore provides opportunity for dress history research using material culture to 'read society' through objects in the Hockey Museum collection (Auslander, 2005).

This thesis will trace the evolution of women's hockey clothing in Britain from c1880 to present to reveal how far gender, class and society influenced women's clothing for participating in the sport. It will discuss trends in designs, adoption, wearing, and manufacturers as well as considering the level of competition (local clubs, schools, governing bodies, and the Olympics).

It will investigate the hockey pitch as a space of liminality for women to test the boundaries of what they could wear whilst exploring the social and cultural attitudes which shaped or hindered hockey clothing's evolution (Gordon, 2009). For women, clothing needed to balance fashionable styles, practicality and feminine ideals whilst navigating fluctuating innovations in textile technology and social acceptance.

This thesis will utilise a material culture approach derived from Jules David Prown's art historical methodology of description, deduction and speculation 'to understand culture, to discover the beliefs- the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions- of a particular community or society at a given time' (Prown, 1993). Dress historians have argued that 'dress artifacts are complex composites of material and cultural values,' therefore theoretical frameworks must be drawn upon to illuminate the evidence interpreted from the textiles.

This will enrich the interdisciplinary research of gender and class relations which are intrinsically bound in hockey clothing, thus engaging with the cultural, economic and social contexts (Mida and Kim, 2015)

Recently, dress historians have researched the history of clothing for sport but little has focused on hockey. For instance, Sporting Fashion (Jones and Johnson, 2021), is a text and exhibition most aligned to the object-based approach of this project and Sarah Gordon's (2009) chapter Clothing for Sport- Home sewing as a laboratory for new standards as well as the Association of Dress Historian's international conference titled Fashioning the body for Sport and Leisure (2022).

This thesis will contribute a hockey specific dress history analysis to the increasing literature on clothing for sport.