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Friday, September 5, 2008
Women in Sports
St. Paul, MN
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The day that I was named “Most Athletic Girl” in my high school is one of my most memorable moments. I’m sure the other two nominees were as relieved as I was thrilled. In 1976, a female athlete was not an admirable thing to most people, but an aberration. In fact, when I started high school in 1973 there were no girls sports teams at my high school. I was swimming for an AAU team, working out several hours a day, and I desperately wanted to compete for my high school. In an attempt to achieve this, I hung out at the pool after school every day while the boys team worked out, repeatedly begging the coach to let me be on the team, assuring him if he would only let me get in the pool I would show him I was able to compete with the boys. Amazingly, he finally gave in and let me give it a try. I’m not sure if he just wanted to get my head under water so I would quit talking or as the father of daughters, perhaps he was secretly an advocate of athleticism in girls. I secured a place on the team and went on to become the first girl in my school’s history to score points on a varsity team. My fight for the right to compete was not the first nor would it be the last in the long struggle for women’s rights in the world of athletics.
The inequality for women in athletics has a long history dating back to at least 776 B.C when the first Olympics were held; men only, of course. It would be thousands of years, the year 1900, before females achieved status as Olympic athletes. At the Paris 1900 Olympic games 22 women were allowed to compete in a very limited number of sports; tennis, golf and croquet. It was still the popular belief that women were not strong enough for athletics. It decreased their femininity and even possibly ruined their reproductive abilities.
Women continued to make slow progress in the world of sports with occasional superstars such as all-around athlete Babe Didrikson, tennis great Maureen Connolly and Olympic track star Wilma Rudolph making strides in the advancement of women in sports. Yet female athletes continued to be an anomaly, most people still believed it wasn’t natural for women to compete.
It wasn’t until 1972 and the passage of Title IX that things began to move towards true gender equality in sports. Title IX mandates that no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal assistance.
In 1973 Bobby Riggs, former world champion tennis player and proud male chauvinist declared that he could beat any professional female player. Billie Jean King accepted the challenge. What started as a simple contest became a media spectacle that was known as “The Battle of the Sexes.” Riggs never missed a chance to talk about men’s superiority and women’s innate weakness. Those words would come back to bite him as 50 million television viewers watched as King dominated him in three straight sets. A simple tennis game turned out to be a major triumph for women’s athletics.
Although Title IX was passed in 1972, it wasn’t until 1975 that regulations on how to implement this new law went into effect. Even then, the law was rarely enforced. It took lawsuits in the 1980’s and 1990’s to force compliance for many institutions. But the law did have a positive affect as shown by the increase in numbers of females participating in high school and college athletics. In 1972 there were only 300,000 girls involved in high school sports throughout the country. Now there are over three million. In 1972 there were 32,000 females in college sports and now there are 170,000.
When I graduated from high school in 1976, I had the goal of swimming competitively at college. It never entered my mind to seek a scholarship. Despite Title IX, athletic scholarships for women were still rare and reserved for the exceptional athlete. I did accomplish my goal and swam for Oklahoma State University. Out of the 18 girls that made the varsity team my freshman year, only two had partial scholarships and they were very minimal amounts of money, more a token than an actual assistance. Meanwhile all the boys were on scholarship and enjoyed the prestige and comfort of living in a special dorm just for male athletes with one of the enviable perks being meals designed to fuel the athlete. I was so thrilled to be swimming for my college, traveling to other colleges to compete, that I barely noticed these injustices. Although perhaps trivial to some, one of the inequalities that stood out was that male lettermen received the traditional letters while letterwomen were denied the letters and given “Certificates of Exceptional Accomplishment.” Most of us saw this as patronizing and clearly sexist. Female collegiate athletes devoted the same number of hours to training and competition and most of us did it for the love of our sport with no compensation, yet we weren’t allowed to even be rewarded with letters.
I would venture to guess that the majority of female high school athletes have no idea what Title IX is or if they do, can’t imagine what the athletic status of women was before that historic decision. I wonder if they can even imagine the struggles their predecessors had to establish women’s roles in sports. As a PE teacher and coach, I’m happy that girls are able to take for granted their rights to participate in sports. It’s a good thing that the current generation of female athletes can’t envision what it’s like to be restricted from the ability to play and compete. But it may also be a good thing to know where we started and to thank the generations of women that fought the battle to pave the way for them.
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