9781422286722

Women's Health and Fitness

For centuries, Western women were taught that they were the “weaker sex.” It was thought “unladylike” for women to excel at any physical skill more demanding than needlework. It is not surprising, therefore, that when it came to self-defense, women were considered helpless victims who looked to their male partners and kinfolk for protection. Fitness training and sports are no longer considered out of bounds for women, but there are still differences in the activities that men and women do. Go to any sports club and you will see more men in the gym pumping iron and more women in the dance studios, doing aer- obics and step classes. Even on the sports field, gender segregation is taking its time to disappear: men have their sports (football, boxing, and baseball), and women have theirs (volleyball, field hockey, and syn- chronized swimming). The martial arts are no exception to this rule. When they became popular in the 1970s, promoted by television series such as Kung Fu and Women have played a growing role in the martial arts since World War II, not only as students, but also as competitors and teachers. Once directed into the defensive arts, such as aikido and t’ai chi ch’uan, women now regularly compete in contact karate and taekwondo tournaments.

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