In “Wherefore Art Thou Feminisms? Feminist Activism, Academic Feminisms, and Women’s Sports Advocacy,” Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward analyze the frequent tensions between feminist academics and activists, and women athletes. If the first camp generally overlooks the sporting arena as a site of feminist concern, the second tends to avoid identifying as feminist for fear of losing the kind of competitive-edge encouraged in the world of hyper-masculinized athletics. “The consequence of this divide,” notes Janet Jakobsen in her introduction, “are all too often those of lost opportunities for solidarity and social change.” Issue 4.3 of The Scholar & Feminist Online – The Cultural Value of Sport: Title IX and Beyond – not only investigates this rift, but also envisions a bridge that, by connecting the feminist and the athlete, would allow women to participate in sports and, by extension, in the world, as true equals.
This issue of SFO was inspired by the inaugural Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture. Named in honor of Helen Pond McIntyre, whose impressive community service included 24 years on the Barnard College Board of Trustees and four years as chairperson of the Long Island Community Foundation, the lectureship highlights the work of scholars who have made extraordinary contributions to women’s studies. In October 2004, the Barnard Center for Research on Women joined Barnard alumna and Trustee emerita Eleanor Thomas Elliott ’48, whose generous gift makes this lecture possible, in welcoming the very first and very fitting McIntyre lecturer, Catharine Stimpson. Professor Stimpson’s contributions to women’s studies are, by any measure, extraordinary. Having taught at Barnard from 1963-1980, where she helped establish and served as the first director of BCRW, Catharine Stimpson founded Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, long the premier journal in the field of women’s studies. She was, in many ways, the only person with whom we could imagine beginning this important new series.
In Part I of this issue we present Professor Stimpson’s lecture, “‘The Atalanta Syndrome: Women, Sports, and Cultural Values,” in which she uses a classical myth to diagnose a cultural illness: the devaluation of women and women’s contradictory responses to it. The provocative issues that she raises about gender and race, about public values and personal embodiment, are at the center of the essays collected here. Journalist and current Chair of the Barnard Board of Trustees Anna Quindlen ’74 offers an intimate introduction to Stimpson’s essay, while, in Part II, scholars Jo Ann M. Buysse, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Leslie Heywood, and Laurie Priest respond to its most pressing and political implications. In Part III, E. Gordon Gee, Tina Sloan Green, Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Donna Lopiano, Tamir Sorek, and Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward bring theory to the playing field by examining the impact of Title IX legislation on women athletes, and the need for greater institutional change. Rounding out this issue, you’ll find an essay by E. Grace Glenny ’04, whose lively analyses of Sports Illustrated cover-art invites us to consider the connection between visual culture and cultural values, and a coda by Karla FC Holloway, who traces the conversation’s many threads through the disturbing and recent Duke lacrosse scandal.
