Wherefore Art Thou Feminisms? Feminist Activism, Academic Feminisms, and Women’s Sports Advocacy

Despite women’s dramatic surge in athletic participation and achievement during the last three decades, feminists generally have not seen sport as a major theater for gender politics and cultural transformation. Indeed, it is fair to say that the historical alliances between feminist activists, university-based feminists, and community-based advocates for women’s sports have been periodic and spotty. We argue here that there is much to learn about the relevance and irrelevance of feminisms for women athletes and their advocates. This essay examines some intersections between several types of feminism and women’s sports movements within a general historical framework. We also examine the current relevance of feminism for women’s sports advocacy within a case study of a network of community-based programs that use sports and exercise to enhance the lives of urban girls in Boston, Massachusetts. Particular attention is paid to the fit between feminisms and the fates of girls of color.

The current cultural visibility and celebration of women athletes is rather remarkable when you jump backward three decades or so to around 1970. Kathy Switzer had to write “K. Switzer” on the entry form for the 1967 Boston Marathon because women were not allowed to run. During the race male judges tried to physically pull her off the street, but with the help of other runners, she finished the race. It took a United States Supreme Court decision in the early 1970s to allow an 11-year-old girl to play Little League baseball with her neighborhood friends. Women’s athletic abilities were unrecognized or ridiculed by the dominant culture when in 1973 tennis star Billie Jean King punctured a big hole in patriarchal presumption by defeating braggart Bobby Riggs in the nationally televised “Battle of the Sexes” at the Houston Astrodome.

In the 1971-72 school year, just 1 in 27 high school girls participated in a high school sport, compared to 1 in 3 girls during 2002-03. ¹ Intercollegiate sports was a man’s world in the early 1970s, swollen with male privilege and patriarchal values, supported by male-dominated athletic administrations, booster clubs, and alumni organizations, and buoyed up by a rapidly growing televised sports industry. At the same time, athletic scholarships for college women were almost nonexistent during the 70s, but they increased markedly during the 1980s. But even by academic year 1995-96, female athletes and their families received $142,622,803 less in scholarship awards than their male athlete counterparts. ² Women were marginalized participants in the Olympic Games of the 1970s, and women’s professional sports had yet to come on the scene. Today U.S. women win Olympic medals in numbers comparable to their male counterparts, and women’s events like figure skating, gymnastics, and soccer generate television audiences few media moguls would have dreamed of before the late 1980s.

It is doubtful that this rapid transformation of women’s interest and participation in sports could have occurred without Title IX. Congress enacted Title IX in 1972 in order to stop discrimination in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. ³ The male-dominated National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) unfurled a massive lobbying campaign against the implementation of Title IX during the 1970s. The forces against gender equity in sports later got a legal boost in 1984 from the Grove City v. Bell case, which limited Title IX’s ban on gender discrimination to specific programs, rather than entire institutions that received federal funds. However, Congress reinvigorated Title IX with the passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1989. The legal and social forces seeking gender equity in sports gathered momentum, and girls’ and women’s participation rates climbed. The struggles between gender equity advocates and opponents of Title IX remain active to this day. ⁴

Women of color also participated in the growth of women’s sports in the United States. They are especially visible in sports like basketball, tennis, and track and field. The number of female intercollegiate athletes of color increased from 2,137 in 1971 to 22,541 in 2000. ⁵ While female athletes of color received less than $200,000 in scholarship funds in 1971, they garnered $82 million in 1999. ⁶ Despite these indicators of achievement and progress, however, it is also true that many girls and women of color have been left behind in women’s historic sprint forward in sport. High school sports, for example, typically thrive in affluent, predominantly white school districts and wither in poor urban and rural areas, where percentages of students of color tend to be higher. Socioeconomic status exerts powerful influence on who wants to play and who gets to play. The merging of class and racial inequalities is also evident in the clustering of athletes of color in certain sports but not others. Whereas female athletes of color were overrepresented in college sports like badminton, bowling, basketball, track-outdoor, and track-indoor, they were highly underrepresented in the next 20 most popular college sports (like softball, gymnastics, golf, rowing, soccer, swimming/diving, ice hockey). ⁷ It is these larger patterns of racial stereotyping and disparate economic impacts on populations of color that produce much of the underrepresentation of females of color. Swimming pools, equine training facilities, country club tennis courts, and affordable rents for hockey practices are difficult to find in poor and working-class communities. Even if poor girls of color do develop an interest in sports, many do not have the personal, familial, or school-based resources to help them pursue their interests. With sports, like other valuable opportunities in the United States, many are called but few can afford the price of admission.

1. National Federation of State High School Associations, NFHS Handbook 2003-04 (Indianapolis, IN: National Federation of State High School Associations, 2003).[↑]
2. Don Sabo, “The Women’s Sports Foundation Gender Equity Report Card: A Survey of Athletic Opportunity in American Higher Education,” Women’s Sports Foundation, East Meadow, NY, 1997, http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/cgi-bin/iowa/issues/rights/article.html?record=190.[↑]
3. Don Sabo, “Different Stakes: Men’s Pursuit of Gender Equity in Sports,” in Sex, Violence & Power in Sports, 202-213.[↑]
4. See Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Donna Lopiano, “Foul Play: Department of Education Creates Huge Title IX Compliance Loophole: Women’s Sports Foundation Position Paper” Scholar and Feminist Online 4, no. 3 (Summer 2006). See also Don Sabo and Christine Grant, “Limitations of the Department of Education’s online survey method for measuring athletic interest and ability on U.S.A. Campuses,” Center for Research on Physical Activity, Sport & Health, D’Youville College, Buffalo, NY, June 2005, http://www.dyc.edu/crpash/limits_of_online_survey.pdf. For an update on current advocacy efforts to save Title IX from erosion, go to http://www.titleix.info and http://www.savetitleix.com.[↑]
5. Jennifer Butler and Donna Lopiano, “The Women’s Sports Foundation Report: Title IX and Race in Intercollegiate Sport,”Women’s Sports Foundation, 2003, http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/cgi-bin/iowa/issues/disc/article.html?record=955.[↑]
6. Ibid.[↑]
7. Ibid.[↑]