Angol
While gender equality has progressed in many sports since the second wave of the feminist movement in terms of women's inclusion, participation, and success, harness horse racing has been recalcitrant to change. Elizabeth Anne Larsen investigates the stories of women involved in harness racing to expose how they use the uniqueness of their situation to work for positive change. The presence of women in harness racing poses a double threat to the dominant masculinity at the track: women's presence as leaders threatens to transform not only what racing is, but also what a harness horseman is. Faced with the potential for such fundamental reshaping of structure and meaning in an historically masculine sport, many defenses have developed to exclude women. There is not only a fear of change, but also a fear of chaos, of distortion (or loss) of masculine identity. With stirring accounts of the strong women who are surviving, and sometimes succeeding, in harness horse racing, Larsen's analysis provides insight for studies of gender and work, occupational sex segregation, and women's studies.
