Lydia Furse on the Women's Rugby World Cup

Women's rugby in this week's podcast brought to you by the British Society of Sport History in association with the Institute of Historical Research with Raf talking to Lydia Furse, who gave a paper at the Sport in History seminar series in 2019. Lydia's PhD is a pioneering work on the development of women's rugby from its origins in late Victorian Britain through its transformation into the modern game in the 1970s and 1980s. Raf and Lydia talk about the difficulties and opportunities of using personal testimonies and interviews in investigating the intersection between the personal and the political in the context of overturning a century of accumulated prejudice against the participation of women in what has been perceived as the most masculine of sports in the British World. They also talk more generally about developments in women's history and the changing nature of feminism and its relationship to women's participation in sport. And Lydia's work has had a major public impact already with her research feeding into the way in which the World Rugby Museum at Twickenham has updated its displays to integrate women's rugby into the history of the game. Finally there's a discussion of the perils of peer review and Raf plugs the Society's grants available to postgrads and postdocs.