The aim of our study is to reveal the factors hindering the spread of women's rowing in the history of the 125-year-old Hungarian Rowing Association and to show women's opportunities for engagement at the beginning and its progress. We will present the greatest successes and their background, as well as the architects of success. We used the volumes of the Hungarian Rowing Association's sports history collection in our study. In addition, we have gained a lot of knowledge from the "eyewitnesses", the great champions of the past seventy years, with whom we had the opportunity to carry out structured deep interviews. Furthermore, with the help of the "Arcanum Digital Science Collection", we have been able to research the writings of the print resources of Hungary's past dealing with women's rowing and, at the same time, "check" any obscure details.
The aim of our study is to show the development of women's rowing and competition, as well as the reasons for its slow spread, taking into account the so called decisive era, the social environment, which, although in various ways, has greatly influenced it all over the world. One of the major research methods for collecting data was document analysis: we used the volumes of Gusztáv Götz's legacy1found in the sports history collection of the Hungarian Rowing Federation, whose spirit we also tried to preserve. In these volumes we found and analysed congressional reports, resolutions made by the national rowing federations, professional articles on rowing and papers on sports medicine. In addition, we studied the relevant literature, namely, studies dealing with the era from sociological, sports sociological and sports historical perspectives. Moreover, via membership in the Traditionalist Committee of the Hungarian Rowing Federation we had the opportunity to meet the great Hungarian female rowing champions of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and we prepared structured in-depth interviews with them. Meeting most often with Anna Domonkos1, Ágnes Bán1, Zsuzsanna Rakitay1. The results show that the international rowing society was divided, the social and medical discourse differed from each other in the assessment of women's sports, sports historical traditions varied country by country and international sports politics also played a decisive role in the delay. With the results, our paper is intended to give a more thorough picture of the reasons why women's competition in rowing has expanded so slowly than the previous analyses did.
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