They Run with Surprising Swiftness: The Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain

The increased media attention on women's sports appears to be paralleled by a synergistic upswing in the publication of scholarly texts about female athletes, if the offerings at a recent National Women's Studies Association Conference are an accurate marker. Of course, as evidenced in Peter Radford's They Run with Surprising Swiftness: The Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain, women's athletic competitions and research on those competitions are no new phenomena. In interviews, Radford has stated that They Run with Surprising Swiftness grew out of his long-ago discovery of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century newspaper coverage of women's foot races, which led to his passion to catalogue each race and runner. Consequently, he offers up over five hundred of these, from that era and earlier, in his text. The bulk of the chapters are predictably devoted to foot races, but women's competitions in tennis, cricket, and other team sports, prizefighting, and equestrianism are also included. He presents an impressively voluminous array of charts, statistics, sketches, and public notices, devoting an energy and attention to his subject that perhaps stems from the fact that he was an elite athlete himself: a double-bronze medalist (100m and 4x100m relay, 1960 Rome Olympics).Radford's goal, stated in the introduction and returned to in the final chapter, is to recover the accomplishments of early British women athletes and to show that “women's sporting history . . . is as long and rich as the men's” (3). He succeeds. His initial chapter summarizes the history of female runners in ancient Greece and Rome, then segues into information on “shepherdesses,” “prostitutes,” and female runners racing alongside gondolas in old Europe (15–16). The next ten chapters are a chronological, in-depth investigation from 1638 to 1850 of who ran (examples: “pretty Sussex spinsters” [74], “supposed Virgins” [60], and “six brewster wives, great with child” [56]), what they ran (in one instance, three, 8.5-mile races in one day!), why they ran (often, for a Holland smock), and who tried to stop women from running (often, the clergy). The following six chapters are about other athletic pursuits, and he concludes with a summary. One of my pleasant discoveries in chapter 16: I share my name with Elizabeth Wilkinson, a bare-knuckled boxer “central to the story of women's prizefighting in the eighteenth century” in London (211).What Radford does particularly well is bring forward the athletic talent and competitiveness of early modern British women through analyses of the variety of media coverage, broadly defined, of the races, games, bouts, and matches. That coverage yields details about the crowds who watched, the competition, promoters, and the prizes they offered, and the athletes themselves. It is remarkable how Radford traces not just one-off races but, in some instances, the long careers of the women. In one description, Radford provides evidence of the ability of Ann Clayton, “a.k.a. bonny Nan,” who is celebrated in an early 1680s ballad. Clayton won a two-mile foot race on Temple Newsam Green and was “a well-traveled and successful racer, having beaten a man named Luke on Bassing Hall . . . in the City of London” (60). He traces the fourteen pedestrian performances of Mary McMullen, from the first mention of her in the Annals of Sporting on December 5, 1826, to the last found mention in the Nottingham Review and General Advertiser on May 21, 1830, and describes McMullen's strategy of declaring a destination and the amount of time she would take to get there—often over ninety miles in fewer than twenty-four hours. The manuscript is chock-full of such details, as Radford makes connections from an impressively deep list of source materials, collating newspaper articles, artwork, poetry, ballads and handbills that celebrate the women who put their physical abilities to the test.They Run with Surprising Swiftness rightly and refreshingly centers the celebration of women in sport but does not neglect to supply evidence of those who challenged women's right to compete. Radford includes snippets of the attempts to shame women athletes; for example, a letter published in the Kentish Gazette in 1769 that calls the runners “loose, idle and disorderly persons” (49). He also provides robust and nuanced analyses of multiple ways the term “manly” is applied to women, sometimes, but not always, disparagingly. The text also includes evidence of race and class issues extant in athletic competitions, the latter being much more prevalent. Radford cites source material that shows many “country girls” competed as a way to earn money or valuable clothing items, but places discussions of these working-class aspirations alongside information on foot races in the name of Sir Dudley Diggs, “earls, dukes, and lords” attending women's cricket matches, and various countesses supporting and at times participating in sport.Radford's manuscript makes several valuable contributions. The field of sport history benefits from his meticulous research and enlivened storytelling, but his is an especially important contribution for women and gender studies. In a field where sport is vitally important historically and in the present, comparatively little attention has been given. Few Women and Gender Studies (WGS) programs or foundational texts include even the barest mention of societal shifts that have happened within or because of women's efforts in athletics. Radford's text offers up an abundance of evidence that we should be including sport in foundational classes in WGS courses.