‘Blessed be the fruit’: doing sports while breastfeeding, the making of gender bicategorisation

In 2019, ultra-runner Jasmin Paris made international headlines by winning the Montane Spine Race while regularly stopping to breastfeed, challenging long-standing notions about women’s physical limitations during pregnancy, maternity, and breastfeeding. Historically, medical discourse has framed women’s bodies as inherently weaker and fragile, particularly during their reproductive lives, and has mobilised anatomical features such as the pelvis and the breasts to justify restrictions on women’s physical activity. While historians have extensively examined the medicalisation of women’s bodies, less attention has been paid to the specific role of the breast as a key operator in the gendered organisation of sport. Drawing on a socio-historical analysis of 189 medical publications (including 53 doctoral theses), sports periodicals, and archival sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article argues that the breast functioned as a central site through which medical experts naturalised women’s exclusion from intense physical exercise and competitive sport. Far from being a neutral physiological concern, the breast was constructed as both a reproductive and aesthetic object, underpinning medical prescriptions that regulated women’s movements, limited muscular development, and reinforced a strict sexual bicategorisation of sporting bodies. By tracing how medical discourses linked physical activity, breastfeeding, and femininity within broader hygienist, pronatalist, and eugenic frameworks, this article demonstrates how sport became a privileged arena for the production and maintenance of gender difference. It further shows that these historical constructions continue to shape contemporary debates surrounding women’s athletic performance, maternity, and breastfeeding, revealing the enduring legacy of medical authority in the governance of women’s sporting bodies.