Abstract: Female sports underwent great changes in modern times, and newspapers and periodicals are the witnesses and promoters of these changes. To investigate the evolution and changes in the concept of modern female sports, we can not make them “visible” and “identified” without referring to images. Our analysis on the female images in the pictorials “Good Friends” and “Diligent Sports Monthly” indicates that the newspaper images constructed three kinds of discourses on female sports: health beauty, competition style and fashion sports. At the same time, under the tide of consumerism and nationalism, images replaced female sports symbols and constructed three kinds of critical discourses: the conflict between China and the West, the difference between men and women, and modern women. Besides, the employment of the visual rhetoric of image frame, body marking and cultural image helped lay a good public opinion foundation for the public’s “recognition” of female sports, thus achieving the image construction of female sports modernity.

Key words: visual modernity, modern pictorials, female sports, visual rhetoric