Lexington Books
Pages: 206
•
Trim: 6½ x 9¼
978-0-7391-9021-0 • Hardback • November 2014 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
978-0-7391-9022-7 • eBook • November 2014 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
Elizabeth Anne Larsen is professor of sociology at California University of Pennsylvania.
Prologue: A Gendered Race
Chapter 1. The Harness Racing World
Chapter 2. Risks and Gratifications
Chapter 3. From a Family Harness Racing Business, or Not?
Chapter 4. Disrespect at the Track
Chapter 5. Working with Family
Chapter 6. Juggling Career and Domestic Demands
Chapter 7. Resisting Sexism at Work
Chapter 8. Women on Future Horse Racetracks
Appendix. A United States Timeline of Women’s Experiences in Harness Racing and Other Sports
Elizabeth Anne Larsen takes us inside the fascinating—and often brutal—gendered world of harness racing. This engrossing study shows how women carve out a place in a male-dominated business of sports.
— Kathleen M. Blee, University of Pittsburgh; author of Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement
Women's gains in professional sports in the post-Title IX era are notably absent in the world of harness racing. Elizabeth Anne Larsen explains how patriarchal relations in the family businesses of owners and trainers sustain and reinforce the marginalization of women in the sport, and shows readers how a growing connection between the sport and the casino/gaming industry is changing the underlying business model, potentially providing an opening for reorganizing gender relations in a way that builds on concepts and strategies from third wave feminism. This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender inequality in sport and in culture industries more broadly.
— William T. Bielby, University of Illinois at Chicago
This very provocative book explores issues that are normally ignored in harness racing. While far more women hold prominent positions in harness racing today, success for women in the sulky has remained out of reach. It is ironic and unfortunate that in the years of harness racing’s greatest popularity, women were still confined to mostly domestic responsibilities.
— Dean A. Hoffman, University of Arizona