All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters. Register now!

‘Four Things Greater Than All Things Are:’ Women, Horses, and Power in History
Erica Munkwitz, American University

     Why does equine history matter? What can histories of human and horse interaction tell us to better illuminate and contextualize both past and present? One way in which to investigate and interrogate these connections is to look at the historic relationships between women and horses. As Rudyard Kipling put it, “Four things greater than all things are – Women and Horses and Power and War.” The experiences of British women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century highlight these changes, especially in the shift from riding aside (sidesaddle) to riding astride (cross-saddle). This switch occurred first in places around the British empire, such as India, thus indicating the important ways that women shaped and reshaped ideals of gender, class, race, and national identity. By bringing the style back to Britain and making it both a popular and acceptable way to ride, female equestrians further fashioned new constructions of identity in the pre-1914 era and enabled women to so efficiently aid the war effort after 1914 by being trained and experienced in riding astride. Women’s involvement had far-reaching consequences: Today equestrianism is one of the few sports – and the only Olympic discipline – where men and women compete against each other on equal terms. Most sports separate the sexes in competition, but for riding it has been the other way around, and this gender equality traces its roots to the momentous shifts in women’s riding at the turn of the century. Thus, we might amend Kipling to say that “four things greater than all things are” are women, horses power, and history.

Read our Member Monday profile of Erica Munkwitz here.