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| Victorian Skaters |
The history of ice-skating goes back centuries, with prehistoric people in northern Europe employing skates of wood and animal
bone. Medieval Dutch skates were wooden platforms with bone runners, which required poles, as in skiing, to help propel the
skater forward. Around 1500, the Dutch added the narrow metal blade, that we would recognize as a skate today, allowing skaters
to skate without the pole by pushing off and gliding with the feet. Skates made entirely of iron were introduced in the 17th
century. Skates were used mostly as a form of winter transportation until more modern times when it came to be enjoyed as
a leisurely past-time and sport. Various improvements to ice-skates were made in the 19th century. An American inventor
in 1848 supplied steel clamps which fastened the skate more securely to the shoe, and in the 1860's and early 1870, famous
American skater Jackson Haines, made a double steel blade, attached permanently to a boot, and invented the toe pick, which
allowed leaps and spins. While people continued to use their local ponds, rivers, and lakes for skating (which carried the
omnipresent danger of falling through thin ice), the first artificial ice rink with mechanical refrigeration was built in
1876, at Chelsea in London, England.
Women's growing participation in sports and other physical activity from the Victorian period through the turn of the
century, including ice-skating, roller-skating (introduced in New York in 1863), bicycling (from 1865), lawn sports such
as croquet and bowling, and swimming, helped to lead to more freedom in dress and behavior for women. Special sporting outfits,
with shorter skirts, or even split skirts in the case of bicycles, allowed women to more safely participate by easing movement.
In a time when a glimpse of ankle had been risque, and even piano legs had been given skirts, lest people be scandalized
by the thought that women, too, had legs, this was real progress!
(To see other dolls in this category, click this link:)
Victorian and Edwardian Designs
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