Girl Power.(Asian women getting into sports)

She towers 20 meters over an Asian metropolis, her abs and triceps rippling and a dainty film of perspiration setting off clingy workout gear. On her lips: a rebel yell. If this were Madison Avenue or Piccadilly Circus, the Nike billboard wouldn't be in the least shocking. But since the ad campaign is running across Asia--even in conservative Malaysia and Indonesia--and because the Amazon on display in unmistakably Asian, the image is daring indeed.

But it's one whose time has come. Increasing wealth and leisure, a slow shift in social mores and exposure to international role models mean that Asian women are flocking to gyms and playing fields around the region. Southeast Asian career women are destressing on weekends playing ultimate Frisbee. Japanese moms are catching waves on their surfboards. Women are hitting Stairmasters from Mumbai to Bangkok. With the fresh burst of energy has come a new beauty aesthetic. For Asian women athletes, tans, sweat and bulging muscles are no longer feminine taboos.

Far harder to change are traditional attitudes about women as wives and mothers. Professional sportswomen and athletic moms remain rare. But their daughters enjoy vastly better prospects. "It's all so different from when I was a girl," says 43-year-old Delhi soccer mom Meenu Nageshwaran. "The attitude that said 'boys could do this and girls couldn't' has gone."

Rising prosperity has helped kill it off. Improved incomes mean that hobbies have blossomed in tiger economies like Hong Kong and Singapore. Just as Westerners did a generation ago, the professional classes have discovered sports for fun and health. As more Asian women have moved into the workplace, they've gained the leisure and means to begin working out. Richer governments have even been providing women's athletics with cash and infrastructure. Hong Kong has appointed a commissioner of women's sports.

The sports boom that began with the middle classes has started trickling down to poorer ones. In India, girls from fishing villages near Chennai have won swimming medals. In a working-class district of Calcutta, Muslim, Hindu and Christian girls pull on boxing gloves for thrice-weekly spars at the Kidderpore School of Physical Education. Suman Kumari's tram-conductor father originally hesitated before letting her attend. At first, he would have preferred that his 12-year- old take embroidery lessons, but now figures boxing might ...