Customer Reviews

When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear

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Interesting book about the history of how women's fashion changed as they began playing individual and team sports. Ultimately the "fashions" developed for playing sports became part of everyday wear for women -- hence, the name "sports clothes" attached to the casual fashions that dominate daytime dressing today.

I used this book as a major source for my thesis paper to earn a Bachelor's in History. It is an excellent resource for anyone interested in women's studies - especially in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. Campbell Warner combines a plethora of gender/cultural/social/historical/fashion/sports scholarship from people like Susan Cahn to textile historians like herself, in addition to great primary sources from places like Harper's Bazaar and Harper's Weekly.

College-level collections strong in both sports history, the arts and women's studies will equally find When The Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear an important study, linking the evolution of women's clothing trends with the rise of women's involvement in recreational sports. The changes in sportswear brought with it and reflected a breakdown in traditional gender roles: Patricia Warner surveys the history of women's sports clothing from the early 19th to the mid-20th century and provides excellent analysis of women's participation in a male-dominated world. An excellent survey prompts readers to understand the connected basics of social and leisure movements and ideology.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch