Between Subversion and Adaptation: Women in Rowing as Spatial Practitioners at the Turn of the Last Century

Abstract

This chapter broadens the understanding of architecture as a field of spatial practice to examine how women engaged with and shaped everyday spaces and urban life around 1900, even within male-dominated domains. Focusing on rowing – a typical “gentleman’s sport” that emerged during industrialisation and excluded women and the working class – the chapter explores how women created alternative spaces for participation. Using the Friedrichshagener Damen-Ruder-Club, Germany’s first women’s rowing club in Berlin, as a case study, it examines how early female rowers navigated gendered exclusions to claim physical and architectural space. Through practices such as organising club activities and eventually building a boathouse, these women redefined access to leisure and urban waterscapes. Drawing on club chronicles, photo albums, newspaper clippings, water maps, and rowing guides, the chapter situates rowing as a spatial practice and explores how gender and class identities were historically mutually constituted through these interventions.