DMU research to investigate history of women's field hockey clothing and its importance to sports culture

A research project at De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) will shed new light on sportswear culture as it looks to record the history of the uniforms worn for women's field hockey.

Emmy Sale will be leading the four-year project in association with DMU's International Centre for Sports History and Culture (ICSHC), the university's Fashion and Textiles department and The Hockey Museum, which is based in Surrey.

Hockey captains from Barstow School in 1933

The Hockey Museum - the only museum in the world dedicated to field hockey - has an extensive collection relating to the women's game and Emmy will be cataloguing, writing about and digitising the collection of sportswear and related artefacts.

Emmy's previous research - she studied hand-knitted bathing costumes from the 1930s as part of her undergraduate degree - is an ideal foundation for the PhD work she will undertake.

The research will also contribute to understanding changing social attitudes towards gender and sport and how this was reflected in the clothing worn and developments in the governance of the sport.

For example, the men's game first appeared as an Olympic sport in London in 1908. The first Olympic tournament for women was in 1980 in Moscow.

And it was not until the 2022/23 season that England Hockey announced that players would be allowed to individually choose between wearing shorts or a skort (a combined short and skirt) rather than being told which the team had to wear.

Emmy, who ran a dress history conference about sports and leisure wear in 2022, started her four-year PhD last month. It will not only appeal to the UK's 160,000 registered hockey players but also lead to a better general understanding of women's role in field hockey history.

Emmy said: "The museum has an extensive collection that has not really been researched and it is not catalogued so even if people did want to look at the collection it would not be easy to do so.

"There is nothing that has been written in depth about the long history of women's hockey clothing. You can read plenty about tennis clothing, for example, but not field hockey kit.

"So, I will be studying the collection, provide a history of women's hockey clothing from the late Victorian period to present and digitise the collection so it is visible and accessible.

"We can then ensure the history and the name of The Hockey Museum is out there for everyone to see.

"I think it is really important that women get to know the stories as to why they were told to wear certain clothing at certain points of time and see how changes came about.

"It seems mad that just a couple of years ago women did not have a choice about what to wear and decide themselves what they feel comfortable in.

"Hockey seems to be a bit late to the game. So why has it taken this long? This research can throw some light on why that happened as well as many other notable episodes in the history of the women's game.

"I spent five years in research grant administration and project management. It feels so right to be going back into academia and it is great to be launching a collaborative research project that I always wanted to do.

"Being linked to the ICSHC drew me to the project. They are doing such interesting and important work in the history of sport and I am glad to be a part of that."

Emmy's PhD will be supervised by Dr Serena Dyer, a DMU fashion history expert, and Dr Heather Dichter, a DMU specialist in sports history and member of the ICSHC.

Dr Dyer said: "Clothing is such an integral part of human history, yet it has often been sidelined by scholars as frivolous and unserious. Emmy's work will contribute to rectifying this, by demonstrating the powerful role garments have played in constructing and subverting gender on the sports field."

Dr Dichter said: "We're really pleased to partner with The Hockey Museum (THM) on this Midlands4Cities Collaborative Doctoral Award.

"THM is a small museum, but one that holds an incredibly rich collection of historical artefacts and archival records of nearly 150 years of field hockey history in Great Britain and elsewhere.

Team GB great Laura Roper in action in 2016

"Emmy will be able to draw on two of DMU's strengths in sport history and dress history during her PhD. The Hockey Museum will really benefit from Emmy's work, both in terms of her work with the Museum's textile collection as well as the scholarship she will produce with her thesis.

"Emmy was an excellent applicant and we are excited that she has started this project. Her previous work already touched on both areas of sport history and dress history, and she will be able to apply that knowledge, as well as her knowledge on gender history, as she researches women's field hockey clothing in Great Britain."

Shane Smith, curator of The Hockey Museum, said: "The museum has amassed an extensive, unique and internationally significant sporting heritage collection in the nation where the rules of the 'modern' sport were formed. Chief among our diverse objects and archives is the excellently preserved but under-studied collection of textiles and dress material culture.

"Having worked to acquire and conserve this heritage, it is crying out to be researched, interpreted and this specialist knowledge applied to the Museum's records.

"Emmy's PhD and scholarly insight will prove invaluable in this pursuit, creating a legacy of new understanding that will have long-lasting benefit, internally for the museum staff and volunteers but, most significantly, for future generations of researchers and the public."

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