Ponytails, sports bras, and tampons may not readily come to mind when imagining the significant factors that enabled women’s sports participation. In Qualifying Times, Jamie Schultz provides a feminist history of these “ostensibly banal elements” (p. 8) of women’s sports participation in the United States during the twentieth century. Applying the work of feminist historian Gerda Lerner who asked, “What are the points of change in women’s historic experience by which we might periodize the history of women?” (p. 8, emphasis in original), Schultz challenges the masculinist bias wherein historical significance is located in political or economic events such as war or financial booms and busts. Instead, Schultz imbues analytical value to the everyday, and does so not in an attempt to shed light onto that which is rendered invisible in traditional historical accounts, but rather, as she argues, “it is precisely because they seem so commonsense and commonplace that they are powerfully connected to gender ideologies” (p. 8).
