Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  The revelation in May 1981 that Billie Jean King was being sued by a former female lover brought the longstanding rumors about the tennis player’s sexuality messily into public view. Here, with Larry’s arm cloaking her in heterosexual privilege, she admits that she and Marilyn Barnett had an affair. Billie Jean King’s script—accepting responsibility for the incident and asking for understanding and forgiveness from her fans and supporters—would became standard practice for public figures dealing with embarrassing sex scandals. She remains the rare woman, however, who was forced to deal with this harsh media spotlight. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Billie Jean King and fellow tennis great Chris Evert share a moment of infectious celebration at the opening ceremony of the newly renamed Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York, on August 28, 2006, while male stars Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe look on with bemused detachment. Just as when Billie beat Bobby in 1973, women athletes proudly claim center stage. Or to put it another way, the girls win. (© Justin Lane/epa/CORBIS)

  On August 12, 2009, with her mother, Betty, and her partner, Ilana Kloss, proudly looking on, Billie Jean King received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama. Honored for her battles for gender equity in sports and as one of the first openly lesbian sports figures in America, King once again demonstrated that sports can be a powerful vehicle for social change. (© Matthew Cavanaugh/epa/CORBIS)

  Chapter Four Before the Sports Bra

  A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN'S SPORTS THROUGH THE 1970S

  On July 10, 1999, more than 90,000 fans at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl and an American television audience estimated at 40 million watched the U.S. soccer team defeat China for the women's World Cup. Tied 0-0 in regulation and after two grueling overtimes, the game came down to a tense penalty shoot-out. When strong goaltending by Briana Scurry kept the Chinese from scoring, Brandi Chastain kicked the next penalty shot to win the match for the United States 5-4. Overcome with emotion and emulating the universal gesture of jubilant male soccer players, she dropped to her knees and tore off her jersey, revealing an incredibly ripped body and a black Nike sports bra. That iconic image came to symbolize the triumphs of the women's soccer team, and by extension, the new legitimacy of women athletes everywhere.1

  While much had been written leading up to the match about the connection between the team’s players and a younger generation of predominantly female soccer fans, the event also resonated with an older generation of women athletes—those who grew up long before the sports bra was invented. Whatever the sport, they too had wanted to play but never had the opportunities that girls and women of the Title IX generations did. To have dreamed of playing before 90,000 cheering fans on national television would have been absolutely incomprehensible in their sporting days. No wonder, noted the Pittsburgh Post, that these older, aging former athletes feel “a bit giddy as they reflect on their careers and lives as pioneers. In a way, the broad-based fascination of the World Cup has become the happy ending every female athlete sought but seldom realized.”2

  Of course, there was a precedent for such giddy feelings: the night Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in 1973. Played before enthusiastic crowds and huge television audiences, both events riveted national attention and sparked nationwide conversations about the status of women in sports. Like the women's soccer team, which came to symbolize the aspirations of female athletes everywhere, Billie Jean King stood for the aspirations of an earlier generation of women at a critical moment in American history. The Battle of the Sexes cemented Billie Jean King’s reputation as America’s first female sports superstar; the World Cup match extended star status to an entire team.

  The charismatic members of the women's soccer team were quickly dubbed “the daughters of Title IX” by the media, but the 1999 World Cup victory is best seen as part of a long and varied tradition of female athletic participation rather than the result of a single piece of legislation.3 Even though participation and opportunities seemed to explode in the 1970s, the story is more complex than that. Title IX did not invent women's sports. As Billie Jean King’s early career showed, there were women's sports and committed women athletes before Title IX—they just didn't get much support or public attention. And changes were already underway before Title IX was passed, laying the groundwork for women's sports seemingly spontaneous emergence in the 1970s. Just as second-wave feminists sometimes acted as if they had discovered sex discrimination, thereby erasing a long history of agitation for women's rights, so too does a focus just on Title IX shortchange all that went before in the history of women's sport.

  Billie Jean King belonged to a transitional generation of American sportswomen. Her career served as a link between older patterns of extremely limited sports opportunities for girls and women and the glimmerings of a brave new athletic future where women's sports commanded respect and resources (almost) commensurate with men’s. The decade of the 1970s was when this sea change began, and, as always, Billie Jean King was right in the thick of it. Her ability to forge a professional tennis career at the same time she emerged as a public advocate for women's sports was deeply influenced both by long-term historical patterns and the contemporary context dramatically unfolding around her in the 1970s.

  FOR MOST OF American history, sports have been a male preserve. Competitive athletics were seen as “natural” for men and boys, but somehow “unnatural” or illegitimate for women and girls. Shaped by a popular belief that women's bodies were inherently different from—and weaker than—men’s, women's sports developed along a path similar to that of segregated schools in the South before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision: separate and definitely unequal.

  Even though society consistently discouraged girls and women from discovering physical activity and organized games, such disapproval never fully stopped the female sex from experiencing the freedom and joy associated with sport. American girls found multiple opportunities for vigorous exercise and play, either informally or through schools or recreational leagues. Especially after they reached adolescence, however, girls were often told to pin up their hair, lengthen their skirts, and start acting more conventionally feminine. Sprinter Willye White summed up the tension between athletic competition and femininity in this way: “A female athlete is always two different people. A male athlete can be the same all the time.”4

  The history of women and sports and the history of women's higher education are intricately linked. With the founding of women's colleges in the 1870s, physical exercise became a way to assuage critics who feared that too much intellectual activity would be deleterious to tender female minds. At first students did calisthenics and gymnastics as part of the curriculum, but by the 1890s they began to participate in team sports such as basketball (introduced by pioneering physical educator Senda Berenson at Smith College in 1893), volleyball, softball, tennis, crew, and field hockey. Students enjoyed the chance to be physically active and seemed to grasp from the start that the emancipation of women's minds and bodies were fundamentally linked.5

  Just as important as developments in the women's colleges were broader changes in society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that encouraged popular sporting and recreational activities for both men and women. The most important by far was the bicycle craze of the 1880s and early 1890s, when women and men took advantage of improvements in bicycle design to embrace a relatively inexpensive outdoor activity that allowed them to go places on wheels that had never been easily accessible before. Other new recreational sports that caught on were croquet, skating, tennis, and golf, all of which necessitated adaptations in women's clothing so that they could participate more freely. Anticipating the modern emergence of sportswear, the new outfits for sport featured a simplified shirtwaist and somewhat shorter skirt, or sometimes divided trousers or pantaloons covered by a skirt, plus the increasing abandonment of corsets. Note, however, that the focus for women's athleticism is on exerc
ise and recreation, not competition. As men’s sporting activities became more organized and popular in the twentieth century, especially in areas such as college football and baseball, competition remained entirely off limits for women.6

  Swimming posed a special case, because of the challenge of coming up with a bathing costume that didn't actually drown the swimmer in its attempt to preserve her modesty. By the 1890s women swam—or, more accurately, bobbed—in short (midthigh) dresses worn over bloomers and thick stockings, while men bathed in public in one piece knitted suits that reached just above the knees. Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman is credited with developing the first one-piece suit for women, which she proudly displayed in swimming exhibitions throughout the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. Even her early bulky versions were liberating compared to the bathing costumes of old; by the 1920s, a trim one-piece suit was standard apparel for most young women.7

  The development and acceptance of new swimwear was critical to the emergence of competitive swimming for women in the 1910s and 1920s. Another critical event was Charlotte Epstein’s founding of the women's Swimming Association of New York in 1917, where hundreds of girls and women found opportunities to train and compete in the organization’s tiny indoor pool on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Endurance swimming, a field where women have a definite advantage because of their higher body fat and lower center of gravity, was a widely followed sport in the 1920s. Perhaps the best example is the huge media attention showered on Gertrude Ederle when she swam the English Channel in 1926 in a record-breaking fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, the first woman to swim the channel, and faster than any of the previous men. As Will Rogers quipped, “Yours for a revised edition of the dictionary explaining which is the weaker sex.”8

  The growth of competitive swimming for women was linked to the history of the Olympics. The modern Olympics were revived in 1896 in Athens. While women competed informally in its early years in sports such as golf, tennis, and archery, founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin had no intention of promoting an equal-opportunity sporting event. Even today, women make up a minority of Olympic athletes. The first official American women selected to represent the country were swimmers and divers at the 1920 Olympics, soon followed by sprinters in track and field competition.9

  As always, women faced hurdles not placed in the way of men. At the 1928 Olympics, the press reported that women competitors were so exhausted by the final of the 800-meter run that they collapsed on the field. Later evaluation of the contemporary coverage, including photographs, challenged this widely disseminated view of female weakness, but it was enough to have the race withdrawn from future Olympics. In fact, the longest footrace that women could compete in until 1960 was 200 meters. American women were a strong a presence at the 1932 Olympics held in Los Angeles, with Babe Didrikson winning two gold medals and a silver in track and field. By 1936, however, American women's participation was declining, even before World War II halted the games in 1940 and 1944.10

  One reason for this decline was a concerted and highly effective campaign against female competition in the 1920s and 1930s, led, ironically, by women physical education leaders. Girls and women who wanted to compete and win were out of sync with dominant ideologies of both gender and sport. This anticompetitive thrust influenced the history of women and sports up until the 1960s and 1970s, including the early years of Title IX.

  In the 1920s, control of the field of women's physical education rested with two interconnected organizations: the Committee on women's Athletics of the American Physical Education Association and the women's Division of the National American Athletic Federation, which was led by Lou Henry Hoover, head of the Girl Scouts and wife of future president Herbert Hoover. Women leaders in both groups grew increasingly concerned about the supposed ill effects of competition on their female charges, both physiologically and psychologically. In response they put forward a philosophy, carefully nurtured in schools and physical education departments across the country, that was summed up in the phrase “a sport for every girl and every girl in a sport.” This model, formalized in a sixteen-point platform in 1923, emphasized participation and play rather than the competition and winning that increasingly dominated intercollegiate athletics for men: “The women's Division believes in the spirit of play for its own sake and works for the promotion of physical activity for the largest possible proportion of persons in any given group, in forms suitable to individual needs and capacities, under leadership and environmental conditions that foster health, physical efficiency, and the development of good citizenship.” Under this new philosophy elite female athletes found their chances to compete took a back seat to opening the competition to all comers, no matter the skill level. Between 1923 and 1930, the number of colleges offering varsity athletic opportunities for women dropped from 22 percent to 12 percent.11

  This creed of sport took several forms beyond the discouragement of varsity competition. Schools instituted play days, where students from several schools were mixed together on teams. Telegraphic meets mandated that athletes compete at their own schools and then compare results with competitors in specific events by telegraph or telephone, presumably to dampen the excitement and stress of head-to-head competition. Sports days brought various schools and teams together, but they were as much social as athletic meets. Other manifestations of this different approach to women's sports were special girls’ rules for basketball (six players, no roving, limits on dribbling) and outright bans on girls playing contact sports such as ice hockey and football.12

  The sport of field hockey, which was especially popular in the Philadelphia area, highlighted some of the pesky inconsistencies that often pop up where gender, sport, and competition come together. A rough and strenuous game, field hockey escaped condemnation because it was played primarily in women's schools. Recalled one physical educator after witnessing a game, “And as long as they had tea and crumpets and it was all women, then it was perfectly legitimate.”13 The sport of field hockey further underscores the arbitrariness of gender in sports: it was okay for women to hit a ball with a stick on a field but it was not okay for women to hit a puck on ice with a similar stick, at least not until well into the 1980s. In addition, because field hockey was a sport associated with women's colleges and because players traditionally wore distinctive kilts as uniforms, to this day very few men learn to play it.14

  While most girls experienced sports in the context of their educational experience, schools and physical education programs did not hold a monopoly on athletics for girls. In addition to opportunities for informal play in their neighborhoods or more organized activities through schools, YWCAS, and settlement houses, more serious female athletes turned to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which first offered national championships for women in swimming in 1916, followed by track and field in 1924 and basketball in 1926. Women also played sports, primarily basketball and softball, on industrial teams, which were sponsored by employers as a way to build employee morale. Babe Didrikson, for example, played basketball for the Employers Casualty Golden Cyclones in Dallas as well as competed for them in track and field in preparation for the 1932 Olympics. Needless to say, physical education leaders strongly disapproved of these AAU-sponsored competitions.15

  Long before midcentury a definite pattern emerged as to how race and class affected athletic opportunities for women. In general, individual sports such as tennis, figure skating, and golf held higher status and broader public approval than team sports such as basketball or softball. Not coincidentally, these individual sports were more expensive to pursue and thus tended to be available predominantly to elite, usually white, women. Conversely, working-class women found opportunities to play recreational softball or basketball through industrial leagues or the AAU, although African American women faced the additional hurdle of segregated facilities limiting their opportunities to play. Still, with a tradition of more physical and outdoor labor and accustomed to strong women in its midst, the Afr
ican American community was often quite supportive of its female athletes, especially in sports such as track and field and basketball. In this context athletic achievements became political statements about African American capabilities in a racist society.16

  World War II disrupted many normal patterns of American life “for the duration,” including professional sports, since many male athletes either volunteered or were drafted into the armed services. Concerned about declining baseball revenues, Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley established the All American Girls Baseball League in 1943. Over 250 women tried out for the teams, and 60 were selected. For talented competitors such as Rockford Peaches first baseman Dottie Kamenshek, to be able to play professional baseball was the dream of a lifetime. The fact that players had to wear skirts as uniforms (not so good for sliding into second base) and follow strict dress, make-up, and deportment codes to project femininity could not dampen their joy, a story brought to modern audiences by Penny Marshall’s 1992 film A League of Their Own. The All American Girls Baseball League survived the return of male ballplayers from the war but finally succumbed to changing patterns of sports and leisure in 1954.17

  In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the world of women's physical education was a small, insular world—separate from the men’s athletic program, dominated by women trained as physical educators, and mainly of interest to and only noticed by the participants themselves. So little was at stake that the men were happy to leave women to rule their fiefdoms with impunity. Following the model developed in the 1920s, physical education leaders were concerned with encouraging sportswomen rather than honing elite athletes, competition was downplayed, and the general participation model still held sway. This philosophy had implications far beyond the gym, as National Organization for Women founder and sports activist Kathryn Clarenbach later realized: “This overemphasis on protecting girls from strain or injury, and underemphasis on developing skills and experiencing teamwork, fits neatly into the pattern of the second sex. Girls are the spectators and the cheerleadersThis is perfect preparation for the adult role of women.”18