Medicine: Horse Riding

U. S. horsewomen, used as they are to coursing astride, noted with secret mockery British news of last week that “a reaction had started in favor of the sidesaddle and the graceful riding habit of a generation ago, as against the man’s saddle and the riding breeches of today.” The objections to the man’s saddle, besides the supposedly esthetic ones, were based on the quasi-medical grounds that the muscles of a woman’s thighs were less strong than the corresponding ones of a man and that therefore a woman was less secure astride a horse—would be more safe while grasping the pommels of a sidesaddle. These muscles, as everyone should know, are the pectineus (comblike) and the adductores magnus, longus and brevis (the great, long and short pullers-in) and connect the femur (the thigh bone, the longest in the body) to the front lower ridges of the sacrum. They adduct the thighs powerfully and are especially used in horse exercise, the saddle being grasped between the knees by their contraction. (The gracilis, the most superficial muscle of the inner aspect of the thigh, is relatively weak.) Nerves concerned are the anterior femoral cutaneous, the lumboinguinal and the ilioinguinal.

Now when a woman takes to horses after adolescence and then chiefly for show, there is some truth in the opinion of the British mooter of the subject,* because her thigh muscles may not have been adequately strengthened in girlhood. But for the girl taught to ride astride from childhood there need be no such fear for her or for her health. She will have learned balance, kept her spine straight, and strengthened her abdominal and thoracic muscles as well as those of her legs. She can keep her seat in a walk, amble, trot, canter, gallop or jump, even in the English saddle with its low pommel and cantle. In the McClellan saddle of the U. S. Army or the cowboy saddle of the ranches, she will have even a more secure seat, as can testify famed Rodeo Rider “Texas” Guinan, now boisterous hostess of a Manhattan supper club.† She never found anything exotic or treacherous in a man’s saddle, and certainly would never weary her pony with the heavier sidesaddle.

* One Horace Smith, perhaps retired Lt. Col. Horace Mackenzie Smith, D. S. O., fighter in South Africa and in the War.

†The Three Hundred Club, 151 W. 54 St.