Abstract des Autors

While the cultural history of body and sports have become well-established fields of historical studies since the 1980s, it has been demonstrated that medical practice has functioned as a moral discourse which produces a regulation of the female body. It has been realised that theories (e.g. of ‘degeneration’) concerning the functioning of the human body bore a great significance to planning and defining the programmes of physical education, gymnastics and sports in the spirit of muscular nationalism. Doctors studying human physiology and training were eager to control not only the female body but also the mind of a gymnast or a sportswoman. This is what happened also in Finland from the late nineteenth century, when the emancipation of women started there. In pace with the demands of educational opportunities and suffrage – gained in 1906 with the establishment of the Finnish one-chamber Parliament – women started to yearn for their own kind of physical exercise, to organise in gymnastic clubs and finally in the 1900s–1910s to argue for a respectable role in the Finnish sports movement. My contribution analyses the dialogue between doctors and influential female organisers of gymnastics and sports over what and how the female body could perform in sports. It should throw light on the ways expert knowledge of medical authorities clashed or compromised with women's self-definition of their body and its functions, which they thought they knew better.