I watched my sisters play field hockey in the early '60s, long pre-Title IX, and it has been considered a “girl’s sport” from at least that long ago.
I also watched my daughter play it in the early 2000s, and found that the game is way more physical now than in the old days. I’d like to watch a men’s field hockey game; I’m guessing it must be brutal!
Field hockey is considered a women’s sport because North American men play ice hockey. That’s my theory.
I’m not so sure. Here on the US east coast, soccer isn’t particularly feminine. It does, however, seem to have an image of being a sport for 1) kids, 2) foreigners, and 3) Hispanics. Many adult soccer games have extensive advertising in Spanish and the “scene” seems to be a heavily Latino thing.
It’s sort of like cricket in the US - very few native-born, culturally American people play it. It’s the sport of Brits, Indians (from India), and Pakistanis. Americans play baseball or softball, which are pretty similar games actually when you look at it. Just tradition apparently.
American boys don’t play field hockey because they aren’t the bloothirsty monsters our girls are.
This is the first I’ve ever heard about soccer being regarded as a women’s sport in America. Is it possible that, when you lived in America, you happened to live in an area that had a prominent local women’s soccer program; or that it was during the time when the U.S. Olympic Women’s Soccer Team was at the peak of their success?
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Since this is sports related, let’s move it to the Game Room.
Moving thread from General Questions to The Game Room.
Well, except that there are lots and lots of soccer leagues for kids around here, most of whom are neither foreigners nor of Hispanic origin. And soccer is a big and popular high school sport as well, again dominated not by Latino kids. Cricket, no.
I wonder if there’s an age aspect to things–that people who grew up in the 60s 70s and 80s view soccer differently than those who grew up later. The Title IX argument supports that too–that a lot of schools brought it in to balance boy’s programs. There’s also the jingoistic foreign-ish aspect of it, adding the slightest effeminate connotation. The world is much smaller now (and has been for twenty to thirty years), and attitudes shift.
Is gymnastics still associated with girls? Doesn’t mean there aren’t male gymnasts or a guy doing gymnastics is emasculated–just that it’s more commonly associated with girls.
Same with figure skating. Culture certainly reinforces the hockey-men/ice dancing-girls association.
And lacrosse (Native American field hockey)? I think it’s on the other side of the spectrum from the frilly feminization that gymnastics figure skating lend themselves to (note that lacrosse isn’t inherently unfeminine). If your a bad-assed, take-no-shit, rough-n-tumble girl who gets the same thrill out of contact sports as a guy does when he plays football, what are you going to do? Some wrestle their way onto wrestling teams or other typical male-sports, but for most, there’s lacrosse.
Sure there’s contact in soccer, and yes, gymnasts, skaters, and softball players are great athletes, but even with constrained rules lacrosse has (generally) much greater contact. You end up with a cohort of athletes that stand out in a competitive sport in ways that track&field, golf, etc., just don’t. Those are great sports, but they’ll never have the cachet that the football players have.
So you end up with an association of top (attention-getting, etc.) girl athletes playing lacrosse. Doesn’t take anything away from guy lacrosse players, doesn’t make it a girly sport. Just one possible reason why lacrosse and field hockey (and roller derby, let’s not forget roller derby) get associated with girls.
I don’t know why Camaros are chick cars.
Yup. I’ve never heard anyone call it a woman’s sport but plenty who think of it as that sport foreigners and children play.
When I was growing up in the late 50s and 60s in the Cleveland Ohio area, soccer was a boys’ fall sport. There were no girls’ teams at any schools that I knew of. Their equivalent sport was field hockey and they had nothing like football. In winter they played basketball and swam like the boys did; they did not have wrestling. In the spring they played softball instead of baseball. They also played tennis and track and field (with some different events) as the boys did.
I didn’t know any lacrosse teams, but one of my girl cousins in the Buffalo NY did play it. I didn’t really know anything about it, but I thought of it as a girls’ sport for that reason. Looking at it now, I don’t think of it that way at all, but when girls’ ice hockey first started up, they played a no-check version (as did young boys) so perhaps there was something similar in lacrosse.
There still is something similar in lacrosse: Men’s and women’s lacrosse are so different they are practically different sports. Men wear helmets and pads and play the hard-hitting, check-him-hard-with-your-body-then-hit-him-with-your-stick game, while the women’s game substitutes the helmets for eye protectors and is a low-contact game with fouls for getting too close to a player’s head, fouls for standing between a player is shooting and the goal, and fouls for shots that are “dangerous”
Definitely a gulf of a difference between men’s and women’s lacrosse. But in terms of women’s sports, is there a widely played team sport that comes close to the contact of lacrosse? Field hockey is its cousin, so there’s that. Roller derby isn’t quite mainstream or played in schools.
Lacrosse: Rugby of women’s sport.
Yeah, same here. Never thought of it as a girl’s sport and most the all boys high schools here in Chicago had soccer teams. I also grew up on memories of the Chicago Sting (a defunct pro indoor and outdoor soccer team), so never had an opportunity to make those associations. Now, volleyball is a different story. In the 80s growing up, we totally thought of it as mainly women’s sport. Our grammar school only fielder a girls team, and my all male high school did not have a team (and I had never heard of a guy school at the time having one.) Yes, we were aware men played it, but the perception was women’s sport. That changed in the 90s, with volleyball eventually being added to boys sport programs. Lacrosse is another one I think of as women’s sport, but that could be because lacrosse isn’t much played around here and the last decade, any mention of lacrosse was in relation to Northwestern’s women’s team.
My theory: field hockey is a girls sport because it was “something for the girls to play during football season”. The emergence of women’s soccer is a relatively new thing, and besides, in most parts of the USA, soccer is a “winter” sport, played at the same time as basketball.
As for “lacrosse and soccer are women’s sports,” I am from California, and have never heard, much less thought, this; in fact, I always considered lacrosse a men’s sport until recently. The closest I have seen to a “women’s sport that men play more than sporadically” is fast-pitch softball.
Soccer is a game invented by European ladies to keep themselves busy while their men did the cooking. -Hank Hill.
Oh, yeah, and being from Chicago, softball has kind of an odd status here. 12-inch softball is definitely mainly a women’s sport, but 16-inch ball is coed, but somewhat more associated with beer-guzzling, oft-gorbellied men. (Although over the last decade or so, I’ve started to see a good deal of co-ed 12-inch softball being played, which feels weird to me, as 16-inch without gloves is the sport I grew up with.)
They played at my all boys secondary school in the eighties and, amazingly, they found other schools to play against.
I’d say the reason few men in the US play field hockey is that they’d look silly in those little skirts.
That’s not as silly as it sounds. In a number of past cases where boys were allowed to play on high school girls’ field hockey teams, the boys had to wear the same skirts as the girls did. Rule 1.4.1 of the national high school field hockey rules says, “Members of each team must be dressed uniformly, except the goal keeper.” (Note that the rules say nothing about skirts - supposedly, they can all wear shorts. However, the rules are written for girls, as all pronouns are feminine.) Usually, the boys act as if they’re wearing kilts.
I saw some teenaged girls a few weeks ago, at my usual grocery store, who were wearing what looked mostly like soccer uniforms, except they were in skirts instead of shorts. It happened to be during the local festival, when we have a lot of high school students from out of town, and since I’m not aware of any local schools having field hockey teams, I assumed they were from out of town. I just guessed that these girls must have been on a field hockey team.
The skirts weren’t those plaid, kilt-like skirts, they were simple, non-pleated short skirts that matched the black & green uniform tops.