by Susan Ware
Like any other magazine, womenSports also had regular features that readers could look forward to in every issue. “Foremothers” offered profiles of pioneering women athletes from history, including golfer Glenna Col-lette Vare, tennis player Hazel Wightman, and swimmer Gertrude Ederle.28 Starting in October 1975, the magazine offered a guide to which schools offered athletic scholarships to women, a clear outgrowth of Title IX that permanently changed the practice of reserving such scholarships only for men. By 1977 this yearly feature had grown so large that it was sponsored by Hanes Hosiery, maker of L’Eggs pantyhose. Said Billie Jean King, tongue in cheek: “We appreciate their energy on behalf of women's sports—and it’s been sheer pleasure working with them,” a reference to one of their most popular products.29
Probably influenced by Sports Illustrated and also by Billie Jean King’s grudge that she had to share her Sportswoman of the Year award with Sportsman John Wooden in 1972, the magazine in 1975 decided to select its own “womanSport of the Year.” Totally surprising the editors, the athlete who got the most votes was not a superstar such as Chris Evert or Olga Korbut but Linda Jefferson, the star halfback on the Toledo Troopers pro football team. Jefferson won as a result of a concerted get-out-of-the-vote campaign by her fellow players and their loyal following among Toledans, including the mayor and the entire city council.30 The editors professed to be fine with this outcome, but the next year they changed the rules so that readers had to vote from a slate of candidates, which produced more traditional choices—Chris Evert in 1976 and figure skater Dorothy Hamill in 1977. Following their editorial policy, Billie Jean King was deemed ineligible for the award.31
One of the most prominent features each month was letters from readers: the magazine always devoted at least two pages to their comments, sometimes more. Once again, Ms. magazine blazed the trail: its July 1973 issue published five pages of letters, far more than the skimpy offerings in traditional women's magazines such as McCall’s or Good Housekeeping. Like Ms., womenSports editors invited its readers to think of it as “their” magazine. “More than anything else,” Billie Jean King told readers in its second issue, “I want womenSports to be a vehicle for all women to use in communicating the joys and frustrations of being involved in sports. In order to make this your magazine, you have to help. Please write us and let us know what’s on your mind. Let us know what you did or did not like in each issue.”32
In response, readers wrote back with ringing endorsements and testimonials of how excited they were to finally have a magazine that took women's sports seriously. Readers repeatedly shared their own versions of the “click” moment so prominent in second-wave feminism when they encountered—and often surmounted—sexism or prejudice standing in the way of the full enjoyment of their athletic potential. And they poked fun at the traditional male world of sports coverage: one reader reported that since womenSports debuted, she had been using Sports Illustrated to line her kitty-litter box. But when the magazine failed to live up to readers’ notions of what a magazine on women's sports should be, they wrote back in tones ranging from disappointment to outrage at the lapses.33
These critical letters offer an interesting window on how the magazine was being received and on some of the underlying tensions of trying to publish a commercially successful, advertising-based, feminist-themed popular magazine devoted to women's sports. Why was jockey Mary Bacon pictured from behind wearing a pair of polka-dot bikini underpants that showed through her racing jodhpurs? “Now this is exactly the kind of sexist shit that I’ve always objected to in the likes of Sports Illustrated” wrote a reader from New Hampshire. “Why does she have to be pictured as a piece of ass on your contents page? Please try to get away from this approach.” Two readers criticized a picture of surfer Laura Ching showing what the editors had captioned “winning form”—a picture in which she is shown simply standing in a bathing suit. “We realize that you, too, are subjected to social conditioning which condones women as sexual objects,” they chastised the editors, “but we would hope that a magazine such as yours—supposedly dedicated to women's athletic achievements—would not stoop to such standards.”34
Readers were also critical of the advertisements, even though these ads made the magazine possible. “The Speedo ad in your March issue was disgusting,” wrote a reader from Summit, New Jersey. “As women, we are again being told that the physical characteristics of our bodies are the main assets in ‘competing’ for men. The ad is also demeaning to the intelligence of men.… Hopefully, as more and more advertising agencies find it unprofitable to use people to sell a product, we will be free of the trash in advertising. Until then, I'll remember the brand name Speedo and not buy its products.” Editors regularly shared such letters with the advertising companies, reasoning that they would welcome the feedback. The Speedo company, for example, changed the ad that many readers had found sexist and offensive.35
Criticism of womenSports’ decision to accept cigarette advertising as incongruous in a magazine devoted to women's sports and health was there from the very beginning, with predictable results: Billie Jean King was just as unapologetic about accepting the support of cigarette manufacturers as she was about Virginia Slims’ role in bankrolling women's professional tennis. In response to readers questioning the policy of accepting beer and cigarette ads, King countered: “We cannot in good conscience refuse advertising space to these categories. First a new magazine is a very touchy business and survival economically does not allow the luxury of doing without advertising. Secondly, the cigarette and liquor industries have supported sports from the beginning and I, as a professional athlete, would be a hypocrite to accept their help in sports events and turn it down in womenSports” Then she added her usual mantra about not smoking herself but believing that each individual had the freedom to decide whether to support specific advertisers. As usual with Billie Jean King, the ends justified the means.36
In womenSports’ defense, it should be noted that Ms. accepted advertising for cigarettes and alcohol throughout the decade of the 1970s, seeing this as a matter of individual choice as well as a business necessity. Where they drew the line was when the editors considered the advertising sexist or demeaning to women, such as the “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” campaign of Virginia Slims that was the backbone of women's professional tennis. (They suggested a different slogan: “You'll Go a Long Way.”) That decision cost them dearly, according to editor Pat Carbine. Needless to say, a similar decision would never have been made at womenSports on Billie Jean King’s watch.37
In addition to complaints about lack of coverage of specific sports such as bowling or too much coverage of tennis and running, as well as gripes about male writers being assigned to stories instead of women, a consistent theme from readers was the lack of attention to lesbians in sports. (Ms. was also criticized for this but had a better track record.) Readers pointedly wrote in to challenge the heterosexual bias of many stories, such as athlete profiles that gave a large amount of space to husbands and boyfriends or quotes from the athletes themselves that denigrated lesbian athletes. For example, jockey Mary Bacon was quoted as saying, “What woman reads about other women unless she’s queer?” Even if that was an individual opinion, readers demanded, why not counter it elsewhere in the magazine with positive portrayals of lesbians in sport?38
Another reader wrote in criticizing the tone of the magazine as bending over backwards so that readers wouldn't get the “wrong idea” about women athletes, which negated the fact that there were indeed lesbians in sport. “To be a woman in sports is hard enough. To be a lesbian in sports is even harder. But to be denied or ignored by other women athletes and womenSports is the hardest of all.” Those exchanges then led another reader to fear that running these letters was merely a tactic to avoid dealing with the issue, which provoked this wishy-washy response from the editors: “WomenSports takes a humanistic attitude toward the gay movement—that is to say, one’s sexual preference is one’s own business. We h
ave yet to be convinced that sexual preference has any direct relationship to athletic performance.”39
Another undercurrent in readers’ letters was the relation of the magazine to second-wave feminism. Obviously its timing and inspiration in the first place linked women's sports with the revival of feminism in the 1970s, but not everyone, including the editorial staff, agreed on how feminist the undertaking should be. Readers ran the gamut. One reader got so sick of athletes distancing themselves from feminism that she wanted to tell them all, “If you have ever become angry because of discrimination toward yourself because you are female—angry enough to complain, to write a letter or to do anything—then honey, you are a women's libber.” Another reader took race car driver Stevi Cederstrom to task for saying she’d been racing long before “women's libbers” knew how to spell liberation: “Any serious female athlete has a grueling uphill struggle, and she’s either going to be a feminist or she’s going to be a loser. I hope Ms. Cederstrom drives with her eyes open, because I think she must keep them closed a great deal of the time.” And yet for every letter complaining that the magazine wasn't feminist enough, there was another that, in the words of one reader, worried about its “overall attitude and tone of a kind of toughness or crassness that has to alienate many readers.”40
In general, the magazine seemed more concerned with striking the right balance between the hard-core athlete and the woman who was interested in sports for health and fitness than with taking a stand for feminism. Evidence from the magazine content as well as the frequent staff and publishing changes that roiled its early years suggest a clear trend away from its original feminist orientation, the result of a combination of financial, market, and editorial factors. At first the magazine aggressively used profiles of leading athletes and overviews of emerging sports and legislation to promote an agenda of equal rights and plans for action. “How to Pick up Men and Throw Them against the Wall” was the title of an article on self-defense in August 1974. That summer the magazine advertised a t-shirt with the slogan “womenSports has balls.” As editor Rosalie Wright said, “We showed women how to make waves.” And yet what seemed like flaming feminism in the sports world registered as tame—or worse—to hard-core feminists such as Jan Cunningham, coordinator of the Task Force on Sports for the National Organization for Women. This was item number four on her list of things to do in 1975: “Think a little bit about womenSports. Write letters of complaint about their sexist articles.”41
By the summer of 1975 the magazine faced real problems: undercapitalization, staff cuts, low circulation, and a demographic not broad enough to attract advertisers. As also happened at Ms., there were heated conflicts between the advertising staff, who wanted enough ads to keep the magazine afloat, and those on the editorial side, who were critical of support from companies such as Virginia Slims and who were not keen on Maybelline or Clairol’s attempt to use sports to promote their commercialized versions of beauty. One casualty was editor Rosalie Wright, who was fired that summer.42 At the last staff meeting before Wright was let go, one disgruntled staff member said, “Billie Jean got up and gave a pep talk about match point and how we were all on the line and all these sports metaphors. Then she and Larry talked about more beauty, health, fashion, and travel articles. It sounded like they wanted a sweaty Cosmopolitan.” In protest six other editorial staffers resigned, practically the whole department. In the fall, the Florida-based Charter Publishing, which also published Redbook, reached an agreement with Billie Jean King to take over the publishing side of the business, while leaving her with editorial control. Journalist and freelance writer Cheryl McCall became the new editor.43
In 1977 the magazine went through another transition to another new editor—Le Anne Schreiber—and a new location, New York, having previously been published in San Mateo. They were up to 185,000 copies a month, but Carlo Vittorini, president of Charter publishing, admitted, “Our biggest single challenge is awareness that the magazine even exists.” For her part Billie Jean King concluded that womenSports had become too narrow, too concerned with the serious athlete: “It should appeal more to the active woman who plays a couple of hours of recreational tennis a week, or goes hiking or bicycling on weekends.”44
By early 1978 things were once again in crisis mode. In January, King told readers in her monthly publisher’s letter that she was tired of slow but steady growth and wasn't willing to wait ten years to see her magazine take off. “If I had that kind of patience, I’d be a golfer—or at least be able to outlast Chris Evert in a baseline rally on clay. But let’s face it, I’m not that kind of person. For better or worse, I play a serve-and-volley game. I want this magazine to go today.” She knew that there were hundreds of thousands of women and girls out there interested in sports—the Title IX participation numbers confirmed this—so she proposed a grassroots subscription drive that enlisted current readers to suggest five sports-minded friends to receive a free copy to jumpstart interest.45
It didn't work. Even though circulation was strong and advertising revenues were good, the magazine was running a $1.5 million deficit, which was too much of a liability when Charter Publishing merged with Downe Communications. The February 1978 issue was the last before womenSports folded.46
Billie Jean King’s vision of a sports magazine for women did survive for another twenty years, however, in various incarnations. In January 1979 the magazine was renamed women's Sports, a joint venture of women's Sports Publications, Inc., and the women's Sports Foundation. Douglas Latimer was listed as publisher, Margaret Roach as editor, and Billie Jean King as founder, although she no longer played an active role. The magazine, which still maintained its glossy format, was conceived to serve a dual purpose: as the membership publication of the women's Sports Foundation as well as a general magazine encouraging “more and more women to discover for themselves the added dimensions that participation in active sports can bring to their lives.” In 1984 the magazine was rechristened women's Sports and Fitness, and it moved even further away from its feminist beginnings.47
What are the lessons of womenSports for our broader understanding of sports and feminism in the 1970s? Even when interest in women's sports was exploding in the decade and more women and girls participating in organized sports than ever before, there was not a clear or obvious way to harness this niche. Billie Jean King was a big name, but not big enough to singlehandedly guarantee the success of a venture like this. From a business perspective, the difficulties of launching a magazine from scratch were just too overwhelming, especially for neophytes such as Billie Jean and Larry King. In comparison, Ms. magazine drew on a much deeper pool of journalistic experience and talent, as well as a broader base of potential readers, which allowed it to surmount some of its early business hurdles as well as articulate a clearer sense of what the mission of the magazine was. And yet it too struggled.
Part of womenSports’ difficulty was that the categories of “women” and “sports” were too broad and diffuse. Some women were hard-core, elite competitors, others were interested mainly in recreational activity; some wanted to learn about exotic new sports, others wanted information about lifestyle and fitness issues; certain readers wanted actual news and results from the world of sports, others wanted more self-help articles; most problematically, some already embraced or were willing to embrace a feminist perspective when it came to sports, others saw no relationship at all between the two. As the magazine found, it was just too hard to be all things to all people. Gradually fitness trumped both hard-core sports coverage and feminism.48
There are many intriguing parallels between the histories of Ms. magazine and womenSports in their various incarnations. Both had a prominent celebrity—Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King—attached to the magazine as a prime asset. Both struggled to reconcile the need to accept advertising, even advertising that was not demeaning to women, with the dependence on companies and products, such as cigarettes, cosmetics, and alcohol, whose health hazards were already we
ll known or that were part of the beauty culture the magazines were trying to subvert. Neither was a traditional mass-circulation women's magazine but instead something of a hybrid, even though each still looked pretty similar to any woman’s magazine that might be found on the newsstand. Each developed an unusually close and reciprocal relationship with its readers, who expected such great things from the magazine that they devoured it from cover to cover when it turned up in their mailboxes and weren't shy about letting the editors know when they felt the magazine had let them down.
There are also intriguing parallels in terms of chronology. Each was launched in the flush of feminist optimism in the early 1970s when all things seemed possible where women were concerned, and each was struggling by late in the decade, just as feminism itself confronted a growing backlash. In 1979 Ms. became a nonprofit under the Ms. Foundation; in 1987 it was sold to an Australian media conglomerate, and in 1990, after a short hiatus, it reemerged as an ad-free, subscription-supported venture. Similarly womenSports reemerged in 1979 with a link to the women's Sports Foundation, renamed itself women's Sports and Fitness, and survived until 1998 when Conde Nast bought it and folded it into its own women's sports magazine, which promptly folded, as did the attempt to launch Sports Illustrated for Women soon after. Today Ms. soldiers on alone, not the same feminist magazine that it was in the 1970s—but, as any aging feminist can attest, who is?49