PearlAnn Reichwein, Charlotte Mitchell, and Lindsay Conrad, Ski Like a Girl Podcast, University of Alberta Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, episodes 1-3: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/ski-like-a-girl-podcast/episodes
Reviewed by Christian Drury
Ski Like a Girl, a new podcast from a group of researchers at the University of Alberta, addresses the history of women skiing in Canada from student ski clubs to elite ski jumpers. Covering both mass participation in the sport and international competitors, Ski Like a Girl looks at the history of female skiers up to the present and the influence of women on the history of skiing in Canada. The podcast team is made up of Professor PearlAnn Reichwein, a historian of the Canadian West, Charlotte Mitchell, a PhD Candidate and former international ski jumper, and Lyndsay Conrad, a MA student, all based in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. The podcast hosts bring personal experiences of skiing together with their historical research. One of the strengths of the podcast is how it highlights student research and presents it to a popular audience.
The broad aim of the podcast is to cover the history of Nordic skiing – mostly cross-country skiing and ski jumping – in Canada. Following a conversational format, the episodes work together to cover professional and amateur skiing, as well as the development of skiing as an activity in several locations. The podcast is well produced and its website provides further material, including photographs and episode transcripts with references. Three episodes have been released so far, with more to follow. The Ski Like a Girl blog highlights some of the other activities of the researchers, such as taking part in the Canadian Birkebeiner Festival – an event rooted in the transnational connections of Canadian Nordic skiing. This supplementary content hints at possible future episodes on skiing’s important role in Canadian history.
The first episode is presented by Lyndsay Conrad and explores the history of the Varsity Ski Club at the University of Alberta and particularly the activities of female members in the 1930s. Beginning in 1932, the Club organised ski trips for students. Conrad has traced the history of the Club through student newspapers and yearbooks, as well as local archives and private correspondence. Student skiing in Alberta was part of a wider international trend towards mass participation in outdoor recreation in the interwar period.[1] Trains were put on for excursions to towns like Banff, allowing for students and workers to spend weekends skiing before returning to study or work. Female participation was an important part of this expansion and the Varsity Ski Club was fully co-ed from its foundation.
Conrad also draws on first-person accounts of skiing and skijoring written for student publications. One notable account, written for the Gateway student newspaper in the early 1930s by an anonymous female student, describes the speed and exhilaration of skijoring. Whilst the speed and excitement of skiing has been analysed as a modern activity by scholars,[2] it has often been seen as a predominantly male activity. It is therefore striking and more unusual to have this kind of description written by a female skier in the 1930s. Skiing was a social activity and a cultural phenomenon, but also an embodied experience.
However, Conrad’s main point is that ski clubs like the Varsity Ski Club acted as incubators of female leadership. Marjorie Montgomery, for example, was part of the Ski Club executive committee in the 1935-36 academic year and went on to become the first female Family Court judge in Alberta. Conrad argues that the experiences of leadership and organising that the Ski Club offered female students were essential to the future success of these women. The Ski Club offered opportunity, community and physical activity for female students that built the skills necessary for these roles.
In the second episode, Charlotte Mitchell combines her research into the history of female ski jumping with her own experiences of the sport. Picking up on the themes of embodiment from the first episode, Mitchell describes the nerves and exhilaration when she jumps. This autoethnographic perspective offers insights into both the technical aspects and the general appeal of the sport. Mitchell was a competitive ski jumper from a young age and, at 14, was the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit against the exclusion of women’s ski jumping from the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. The absence of women’s ski jumping from the 2010 Games shows the persistence of obstacles for female skiers. Although women’s ski jumping was included at the Sochi Games four years later, this was too late for Mitchell and others in a sport that struggles to retain women and girls into their twenties.
Mitchell’s research highlights how female ski jumpers have been excluded from the sport and the persistence of myths about the dangers of ski jumping to women’s “reproductive organs.” However, women jumped despite attempts to prevent them. Women have taken part in ski jumping since the late nineteenth century in Europe and North America. Ski jumping was particularly popular and prominent in Norway. Johanne Kolstad, a Norwegian ski jumper, became internationally known in the 1930s. She jumped in an indoor event in Madison Square Garden in 1937 and was embraced as a significant national figure at home.[3] Mitchell’s research adds important Canadian perspectives to this transnational history of ski jumping, emphasising a longer history of the sport in Canada that is often elided. Moreover, her dual role as historian of and participant in ski jumping gives her a depth of perspective to address this gendered history of ski jumping. She highlights change for the better, but also the problems and barriers that women still face when jumping.
The third episode focuses on the history of women skiing and the development of winter tourism in Jasper in the twentieth century. Conrad and PearlAnn Reichwein show how Jasper grew as a winter tourism destination from the 1920s and how women were active as participants and as employees in travel companies. Women like Dolly Johnstone participated in ski competitions, including racing and jumping, in the 1930s. Doris Kensit booked backcountry ski excursions for tourists, but also made these trips herself. Kensit participated in an oral history project run by Jasper Yellowhead Museum in the 1990s and the podcast uses extracts from her interview. These audio clips work well in the format and offer listeners direct access to the researchers’ sources. Kensit’s accounts of ski touring show the scale of her activities, as well as the risks involved. Combined with Reichwein’s previous research, the episode highlights the role of women in the development of Jasper National Park as a cultural construction, as well as female experiences of skiing in the Park.[4] Women played an important part in the creation of Jasper National Park as a destination for outdoor tourism – one designed to rival the Swiss Alps! Canadians could now pursue domestic tourism in wild places and were actively encouraged to do so by advertisers and local authorities. One particularly interesting point from the episode, and one in keeping with the general tone of the series, is the focus on the local. Using local publications, (such as town or university newspapers) and local oral history projects offer perspectives that national or regional archives often overlook and are crucial for highlighting the scale and significance of female participation.
The podcast will be useful and interesting to a range of scholars, particularly historians and sociologists of sport and outdoor recreation. It also has clear relevance for those studying the interwar period and changing relationships between landscapes and tourism. Its methodical range and innovation will also interest scholars beyond the field and the centrality of student research also provides a model for accessible and impactful historical work. Moreover, the collaborative nature of the project offers an interesting model for projects involving postgraduate students and supervisors. The podcast would also make a good teaching resource at undergraduate level, offering an accessible way to approach the history of sport and recreation, as well as local history in Canada. The podcast works as environmental history by reflecting on the relationships between women and landscapes, thinking about embodied experiences of ski touring and jumping. Snowy landscapes – be they backwoods or jumps – were and are also spaces where women could reaffirm their place in changing societies.
Feature Image: Vegar S. Hansen, Ski Jump: Mixed Team Competition — Anna Odine Strøm (Norway), 2016, CC BY-NC 4.0.
Footnotes:
[1] See, for example, David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (Second Expanded Edition) (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), pp. 105-114, for the British context.
[2] See, for example, Andrew Denning, “Alpine Modern: Central European Skiing and the Vernacularization of Cultural Modernism, 1900-1939”, Central European History 46 (2014), 850-890 on skiing and modernity in the Alps.
[3] On Kolstad, see Annette R. Hofmann, “The ‘Floating Baroness’ and the ‘Queen of the Skis’”, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 29:2 (2012): 247-258.
[4] PearlAnn Reichwein, Climber’s Paradise: Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, 1906-1974 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2014).
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