Idealized Middle-Class Sport for a Young Nation: Lacrosse in Nineteenth-Century Ontario Towns, 1871-1891

Late nineteenth-century amateur sport was one forum where middle-class men struggled to establish a cultural hegemony. The development of amateur lacrosse in the small southwestern Ontario towns of Ingersoll and Woodstock, between 1871and 1891, shows that local middle-class sport reformers used lacrosse to make their vision of reality credible, and to contribute to the formulation of a broader Canadian culture which would buttress their image as natural social leaders. Connected to an evolving cult of respectability, they sought to eliminate rowdiness from local sport and monopolize the forms and meanings that sport was to take. Their lacrosse embodied muscular Christian precepts and embraced social themes of particular importance to the reform-minded. Their clubs, which were filled with working-class youth, enlisted cooperation from subordinate groups. Ultimately, however, reformers’ efforts to define legitimate activities for others remained an ongoing process, since the connection between team and town, fostered by capitalist boosterism, and shaped by the hand of middle-class men, contained within it the seeds of a displaced rowdyism.