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This article seeks to redress the lack of research on women's roles as riding instructors and sport coaches in Britain. During the long nineteenth century, women were enmeshed in professional equestrian activities, and their activities had momentous consequences on the practice of equestrianism as a whole. Women were needed to teach riding to other women because women rode differently from men – on a different saddle and in different clothes. These differences created a space, and a need, for a new kind of female businesswoman, coach, and sporting authority, and enabled a new kind of sporting liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thus, for anyone interested in sporting or equestrian history, Mike Huggins' new study, I Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century i , is an essential book. Horse racing as it developed three hundred years ago in England not only influenced the eighteenth-century world of politics and culture but reached forward to shape the global sport as practised today. As Huggins proves, horse racing was about more than passive masculine sociability and elite leisure; race meetings were active buzzing hives of political activity as well. [Extracted from the article]

Women achieved sporting egality with the most unlikely device – the sidesaddle. The modern sidesaddle appeared in the 1830s, and though it made female riders appear to be unequal, seated sideways on a horse, it (and new riding clothing) actually gave women new abilities to ride and hunt. On horseback, women achieved visual power, tangible command, and personal sovereignty. Riding, unlike other sports and games, catalyzed the development of what contemporary authors called 'self-possession': no one else could look after a female rider or direct her mount. In a literal sense, women took charge of their own lives through riding. The sidesaddle was therefore not a hindrance, but an aid to female riders in seizing their own destinies. It was a catalyst for a sporting revolution and a device of individual liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]