A Sound Citizen in a Sound Body: Sport and the Issue of Women’s Emancipation in 1920s Sweden

This article focuses on a rare phenomenon: a feminist sport federation active in Sweden during the 1920s. The analysis of rhetoric and ideas on women’s sport show how the association wanted to both politicize sport and enter the sport arena. Women’s sport was regarded as part of an ongoing modernization process, where women needed to develop physical strength and stamina. Through practicing sport, women would be “fit for society,” the Swedish Women’s Federation for Physical Culture (SKCFK) emphatically presented their vision of the female body as productive and capable, with strengths that should be further developed through exercise. Representatives of the federation spoke against biologizing statements about women’s fragile physique. When the activities of SKCFK faded out in the beginning of the 1930s, it meant the end of separate women’s sport in Sweden. It was not until the influence of the feminist second wave during the 1970s that gender equality was put on the agenda of the Swedish Sport movement.