Throughout much of the past century, the woman athlete has been a controversial public figure. Noted for her muscular physique, her athletic virtuosity, and her bold entrance into a traditionally male arena, she has embodied society's hopes, fears, and conflicts about ever changing definitions of womanhood. Sometimes celebrated as the quintessential modern woman, other times condemned as a repulsive aberration from proper femininity, the woman athlete has provided a focal point for larger cultural debates about gender relations and, specifically, the much disputed question of whether men are "naturally" or physiologically superior to women. As popular debates swirled around them, however, most women played sports simply for the pleasures and challenges of athletics. Through sport, they found opportunities to develop skills, win public acclaim, expand their social worlds, and push their physical and mental limits through competition and teamwork.
In the early 1800s women romped, skated, played Native American ball games, and sometimes entered road races and boxing matches. Not until the late nineteenth century did women enter organized sports in significant numbers. In the post-Civil War decades, wealthy white women took up country club sports like tennis and golf while middle-class girls and women rode bicycles, followed exercise regimens, and played basketball and baseball at their high schools and colleges. In the 1910s and 1920s young working-class women also took up sports in municipal athletic leagues, YWCAs, ethnic clubs, and workplace recreation programs. In Chicago, for example, African American women played basketball on the powerhouse "Roamer Girls" team while Jewish baseball players from the Hebrew Institute formed the "Hebrew Maidens" team.
Early-twentieth-century observers were fascinated by the "modern athletic girl," who seemed to thrive in every class, racial, and ethnic community. Lippincott's Monthly in 1911 glowingly described the modern athletic woman: "She loves to walk, to row, to ride, to motor, to jump and run ... as Man walks, jumps, rows, rides, motors, and runs." Some doubted that the resemblance was a change for the better. In 1912 the Ladies' Home Journal published a piece whose title, "Are Athletics Making Girls Masculine?", signaled alarm at the very possibility. The article posed the question in its starkest terms: Would female athleticism turn women into masculine facsimiles of the opposite sex? Or might women "feminize" sport, eroding the boundary between male and female realms?
When women competed seriously as athletes, they threatened men's exclusive claim to "masculine" qualities of physical aggression, strength, speed, and power; women's participation in sports suggested that physical differences between the sexes might be an artifact of culture rather than a law of nature. Much of the debate about female athleticism focused on an area of undisputed physical difference—women's reproductive capacity. Although doctors had long recommended moderate exercise as a cure for menstrual irregularity and discomfort, women's enthusiasm for highly competitive sport pushed experts toward a revised view of athletics as dangerous. Doctors and physical educators warned that excessive exercise would damage reproductive organs, diminish fertility, and overstimulate female emotions to the point of nervous collapse. They warned as well that overindulgence in sport would reduce the sexual inhibitions, and thus the moral stature, of the "overzealous girl."
In response to such fears, medical experts and women physical educators agreed that the best policy was to recommend moderate competition under separately supervised female athletic programs. The policy of moderation sought to preserve the benefits of sport to the modern athletic girl while at the same time ensuring her physical safety and moral respectability. For women physical educators, "moderation" also served as a rationale for their separate control of women's sports in schools and colleges around the country. From the 1920s to the 1970s, school athletic programs typically limited female students to intramural competition among classmates, banning interscholastic competitions as too strenuous and "unladylike."
As the policy of moderate competition took hold in school and city recreation programs, commercial sport promoters and sympathetic journalists worked out another solution to the conflict between femininity and athleticism. Responding to the charge that sport made women ugly and unfeminine, promoters and journalists countered with the claim that an athlete's "masculine" skills were offset by her appealing femininity. The media, enraptured with aquatic stars like Helene Wainright and tennis "goddesses" like Helen Wills, promoted women athletes as exemplars of a new standard of beauty characterized by physical energy and a sassy vitality. Advertisers even hosted beauty pageants as sidelight events at athletic tournaments, featuring athletes as contestants. To their credit, sports promoters actively supported highly competitive sport for women. But by constantly contrasting women's "masculine" athletic talents with their "feminine" attributes, their strategy implicitly apologized for women's athletic skill and confirmed the essential masculinity of sport.
This strategy of promotion mixed with apology increased the popularity of women's sport in the years between World War I and World War II but did little to reduce the underlying tension between sport and womanhood. In fact the great popularity of sport in the 1920s led many journalists to view it as a site of women's larger challenge to male authority. Reporters described record-breaking female performances as "battle[s] won for feminism" by women athletes "who can meet the male upon even terms." Although few women competed directly against men, the press regularly reported on women-only events as if they were mixed competitions designed to dethrone men from their designated position of athletic and social superiority. Catch phrases such as "Men's athletic crown in danger" or "Who will be the weaker sex?" hinted that underneath the fascination with female athletic achievements lay a perception that women's athleticism did indeed challenge men's physical and cultural authority.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, the sense of imperiled manhood became more explicit. The playing fields were increasingly populated not by glamorous swimmers and golfers but by white working-class women, African American women, and other women of color, who competed on factory-based teams, at the renowned Tuskegee Institute track teams, or for ethnic clubs like the Polish Falcons. As the unsettled social relations of the Depression and war years sparked a renewed conservatism on matters of gender, the media's earlier tone of wondrous appreciation shifted to one of suspicion and hostility.
The career of Mildred "Babe" Didrikson illuminates the changing currents in women's sport. As a working-class teenager from Port Arthur, Texas, Didrikson was recruited in the late 1920s to play for a Dallas insurance company and soon became a national celebrity when she won two golds and a silver medal in track and field at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. With her slim, angular build, close-cropped hair, and baggy sweatsuit, Didrikson was a diamond in the rough who delighted the media with her homespun manner and razor-sharp wit. Yet because she excelled in the more controversial women's sports—track, basketball, and baseball—and failed to meet conventional standards of femininity or show any romantic or sexual interest in men, Didrikson's spot in the limelight faded quickly. By the late 1930s, if the press referred to her at all, it was as a freakish anomaly.
In the mid-1940s, however, Didrikson made a remarkable comeback in the sport of golf. To ensure her success, Didrikson muffled her earlier outspokeness and, like many mid-century U.S. women athletes, chose a path of compromise. She took up a more "respectable sport," began to wear skirts and makeup, and married professional wrestler George Zaharias. She successfully revived both her career and her image through a combination of astounding skill and accommodation to prevailing gender norms. The press commented less on the former and more on the latter; in 1947 Life magazine featured Didrikson under the headline "Babe Is a Lady Now: The World's Most Amazing Athlete Has Learned to Wear Nylons and Cook for Her Huge Husband."
The Midwest-based All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which drew over a half-million fans annually between 1943 and 1954, adopted a similar approach. The league employed what officials called the "femininity principle," a shrewd strategy designed to contrast athletes' "masculine skill" with their "feminine attractiveness." Dressed in pastel, skirted uniforms and forbidden by league rules to wear their hair in boyish bobs or to dress in masculine garb, AAGPBL players courted public approval with a wholesome girl-next-door image while thrilling their fans with stellar play. Although some players approved of the femininity principle and others found it ludicrous, all agreed that abiding by the rules was a small price to pay for the chance to pursue a dream—playing high-level professional sport before appreciative audiences. Women of color were denied this opportunity, since the all-white league management believed that African American players, in particular, might damage the league's "feminine" image. Outside of the Olympics, a de facto color bar prevailed until the 1950s, when Althea Gibson broke the racial barrier in women's tennis.
The near obsession with femininity in the postwar era spoke to a relatively new anxiety connected to women's sport—the matter of lesbianism. As mentioned earlier, previous fears about women's sexuality centered on the possibility that sport might remove sexual inhibitions and unleash women's heterosexual passions. But mid-century Americans more often suspected that the erotic desires released through sport might be those of women for other women. During the first half of the century, the recognition of active female desire, the acceptance of Freudian theories of sexual development, and a greater awareness of homosexuality combined to cast sexual suspicion on all women who did not appear appropriately feminine and heterosexual. Women athletes, long noted for their "masculine" skills and desires, became prime targets of the heightened sexual suspicion.
Although lesbians typically rejected the pernicious stereotype of the mannish lesbian athlete, by the 1940s and 1950s many athletically inclined lesbians had found sport to be a convivial and safe space to gather with other women. As a public activity that encouraged a certain amount of gender unorthodoxy—to "throw like a boy" was a good thing in sport—and nurtured close bonds among women, sport provided a social space in which lesbians could express themselves and create a sense of community.
By the 1960s the problematic image and limited popularity of women's sport had created something of a stalemate. Women continued to compete in school sport, industrial and community-based recreation, and high-level amateur competitions like the Olympics, but they did so with minimal financial support, scant media coverage, and damning suspicion about their sexual preference. However, the stasis soon gave way to change as a restless generation of young physical educators began to lobby for intercollegiate competition. Women within the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) were also pressing for change, and after decades of rivalrous animosity physical educators and AAU leaders joined forces to promote women's athletics.
With the new wave of feminism in the early 1970s, women's athletics entered a watershed era in which long-standing barriers to full participation in sport seemed to fall almost as fast as women could push them over. Bolstered by the women's movement, advocates of women's sport began demanding equal access to athletic resources and training. They won their most important and controversial victory with the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Educational Act, which prohibited sex discrimination in any educational institution receiving federal funds. Although slow to be enforced, the act dictated that schools at all levels establish gender equality in their athletic programs.
Title IX and the momentum it generated ushered in two decades of significant athletic progress not limited to academic institutions. While professional athletes such as tennis player Billie Jean King organized women's tours and campaigned for increased prize monies, amateur women's sport blossomed at all levels, from elite Olympic competitions to community-based programs like youth soccer, aerobics, and adult softball. Girls' participation in interscholastic high school competition jumped from three hundred thousand in 1971 to more than two million in 1992. In women's college sport, the number of intercollegiate athletes rose from sixteen thousand to over one hundred sixty thousand between the early 1970s and late 1980s. Along with this dramatic increase in numbers, women athletes have also earned far greater acceptance and appreciation as women such as tennis star Martina Navratilova (who is now "out" as a lesbian), track champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, speed skater Bonnie Blair, and figure skaters Debi Thomas and Kristi Yamaguchi became household names and national celebrities.
The recent popularity of women's sports also indicates its pivotal and controversial place in ongoing conflicts over gender and power in U.S. society. Within sport, issues of access and equity are by no means resolved. After more than two decades since Title IX, few colleges meet standards for gender equity in school sport, and women's athletics are typically governed by male-dominated athletic departments and national sports organizations. Some women's struggles around body image and sexuality suggest that the persistent tension between sport and womanhood continues to affect athletes on a personal level as well. For some, the pressure to meet ever shrinking ideals of thinness has turned athletic training into a punitive program of weight loss rather than a source of skill or enjoyment; for others, the continued stigma of the "mannish lesbian" creates pressure to leave sport, compete less vigorously, or remain closeted.
Far from being discouraged, women are approaching these barriers with a new sense of entitlement, energized by their own positive experiences in sport. In its fullest expression, the demand for meaningful leisure, unrestricted access to sport, and athletic self-determination involves more than simply forcing men to make room for women in the existing sports world. It demands that athletic attributes long defined as masculine—skill, strength, speed, physical assertiveness, uninhibited use of space and motion—become human qualities, not those of a particular gender. Ultimately, obtaining athletic freedom will be part of transforming the broader social relations of gender within which sporting life takes place.
Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (N.Y.: Free Press, 1994); Helen Lenskyj, Out of Bounds: Women, Sport and Sexuality (Toronto: Women's Press, 1986); Mariah Burton Nelson, Are We Winning Yet?: How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women (N.Y.: Random House, 1991).
Susan K. Cahn
See also
Title IX.
