Courage, endurance and quickness of decision - Gender and athletics at theUniversity of Chicago, 1890-1920

This article addresses the gendered assumptions about men and women's roles within collegiate culture at the University of Chicago. Specifically, it h ighlights how notions of men and women's physical capacities, their pattern s of sociability and the physical spaces they occupied on campus manifested the mark of gender differences. Debates over the role of athletics at the University illustrate the continued belief in the different needs and roles of men and women, even within a coeducational institution. These pervasive assumptions of difference forced female students and educators to walk a f ine line between providing for the 'special needs' of women, and fighting f or equal status within all University programmes, including athletics, in t he Progressive Era. Moreover, the spatial dimension of these debates about gender illustrated how the presence of the female body in a space often per ceived as 'male' (the university campus) led to the creation of plans inten ded to circumscribe women's place so as not to 'overfeminize' and thereby u ndervalue university education. Examining collegiate culture through the le ns of athletics exposes many of the assumptions about gender difference tha t structured the modern university. Highlighting the material culture of th e university offers a useful tool in rethinking the process by which these assumptions became inscribed in the built environment, helping both to refl ect and reify complex and often contradictory cultural attitudes about gend er.