'Attractive Athletics', 1877. Artist: Priestman Atkinson

'Attractive Athletics', 1877, showing a young lady skipping. This recommends that athletics are 'as necessary to the health of the softer sex' as well as being 'useful aids to innocent flirtation'. Girls and women should exercise, but many forms of exercise had to be ruled out unless there was a radical reform of costume. From Punch, or the London Charivari, July 28, 1877. (Photo by The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)