Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport (review)

To imagine figure skating might be to picture a young woman in a sequined outfit gliding through a performance equal parts graceful artistry and pixie-like movements. This is a stereotype to be sure and does a disservice to the athleticism of the women and men who skate. Figure skating privileges both artistry and athleticism, but it is in the uneasy relationship between the two that Mary Louise Adams finds a space to adeptly explore the ways in which the sport’s history reveals shifting gender norms for both men and women. The scholarship exploring the “artistic” sports into which women’s participation has historically been marshalled (I.e. gymnastics, figure skating) often focuses on the barriers women have faced to compete in more “athletic” sports. Adams chooses the obverse course, interrogating the gendered nature of figure skating and examining the ways in which this presumptively feminine sport has exemplified shifting norms of masculinity, providing evidence of “how historically contingent our notions of men’s and women’s sport categories are” (p. 137).

In the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries skating was an almost exclusively male pastime, one that reflected the participants’ “privileged class backgrounds and the gender norms that were particular to them” (p. 83). Skating was, Adams argues, a demonstrable exhibition of class boundaries “on display to anyone who happened to pass by the skater’s frozen pond . . . skating made class differences visible” (p. 107). But there were national distinctions. On the continent, most prominently at the Wiener Eislaufverein (Vienna Skating Club), skaters used their entire bodies, arms included, offering expressive movements on the ice. But in Britain, in contrast to the international or continental style, skaters were much more rigid and precise in their movements. Bodies were stiff, arms at the side, as skaters traced precise movements on the ice.

These two approaches were both, over time, integrated into competitive figure skating as the pastime moved from recreational display to codified sport. The precise British figures are still reflected in figure skating’s required technical elements, while the expressive movements of the continental style resonate within the sport’s more subjective grades for artistic impression. These components also reflect a long-standing debate over the nature of figure skating: is it art or sport? As this debate played out, it was skating’s social element that facilitated women’s entry – as the partners of men – into a pastime that was at the time a slightly more athletic form of a stroll through an urban park in the late-nineteenth century city. Figure skating was leisurely enough to be consistent with Victorian prescriptions on exertion by women while its gentility protected the class position of all participants.

In the early 20th century, Adams argues, debates on participation in skating centred more on issues of class standing than they did on protecting heteronormative gender ideals. In examining the texts (manuals, memoirs) of early-20th-century skating, Adams uncovers few fears among men over women’s increasing competence at skating and no panic over men losing to women, as happened at some of the early competitions where there were not separate gendered competition categories. Moreover, for most commentators there was no apparent fear women would be masculinized by competing against men – unlike the narratives of other more typically male, to which as women struggled to gain access in the post-First World War, an era called by some the “golden age” of women’s sport (an age that was not to survive the post-Second World War reassertion of traditional femininity).

As long as figure skating was seen primarily as “a social or artistic pursuit” rather than an athletic competition, “the easier it would be for women to choose to do it” (p. 120). But skating’s popularity as a spectator sport and its formal inclusion in the Olympic programme beginning in 1920 heightened the sensitivity to gender barriers. The success of women skaters in the early-20th century became more problematic...