Strong, active women: (Re)doing rural femininity through equestrian sport and leisure

Horse riding is a popular leisure activity within rural Britain. Straddling two masculinized social contexts – rural, land-based society and sport/physical recreation – horse riding is a feminized, yet mixed-sex, milieu. This article presents data from an ethnography of the social world of horse riding to consider how women within this context do and redo gender in ways that may begin to challenge ideas about what women are, and what they are capable of, within rural and sporting contexts. Women’s active leisure in the countryside has been rendered largely invisible for decades, yet women’s sport/physical recreation forms an important part of rural leisure worlds. This ethnographic study of women and horse riding offers examples of how feminine identities help shape the rural leisure landscape in ways that begin to redefine gender relations and gender identities within the British countryside in small, yet potentially significant, ways.