Why are there keep-fit races specifically for women? How were they established and why are they so popular? Are girls’ races good or bad if the goal is greater equality in sport? With this book, Karin S. Lindelöf and Annie Woube (both ethnologists working at the Centre for Gender Studies, Uppsala University) shed new light on girls’ races and their participants.

The history of sport shows how women have been excluded from major keep-fit events for paternalistic, sexist, and downright idiotic reasons. The pictures of Kathrine Switzer, who was forced to defend herself against an attack by a functionary to be able to finish the Boston Marathon in 1967, are iconic. In Sweden we have several examples of women who defied the ban on participating in the Vasaloppet ski race. Girls’ races (tjejlopp) should be understood in the light of this historical heritage – they are a response to exclusion mechanisms that were at first highly concrete, but they have additionally had a more subtle impact on the culture of keep-fit sporting events. Here, as in sport in general, men have often been the norm. In the girls’ races, it is the other way around. As Lindelöf and Woube ably demonstrate, this entails both a liberating element and a limiting image of women doing sports.