by Susan Ware
For many girls, their main—and often only—exposure to exercise and sport was in required gym classes at school. Gym teachers ran P.E. classes like army drills, at least in the memories of many unathletically inclined participants, hardly an inducement to the joys of lifelong physical activity. (Of course to budding lesbians, their gym teachers were often the objects of endless fascination and unrequited desire.19) The dreaded gym uniforms remembered today by any woman born before 1950—sacklike skirted garments, with bloomer-type shorts underneath, usually in an unattractive shade of blue or green—didn't help. And yet for those girls who loved sports, gym class and intramural competitions were a chance to revel in physical activity.20
Well before the feminist and sports explosions of the 1970s, this tightly knit world of women's physical education was beginning to change. Play days were eliminated (“High school girls are bored to death at play days,” noted one teacher) and more teams set up. These women's teams were a far cry from post-Title IX ventures, however. They generally lacked budgets and were coached—without compensation—by members of the physical education department; no trainers or supplies were provided. If students had uniforms, they generally made or bought them themselves, and then washed them, of course. Instead of a full schedule, teams might play five or six games a year. To get to away games, the coach drove the team in her own car, and the team saved on expenses by packing as many girls as possible into hotel rooms and bringing their own food. Of course there were no athletic scholarships. Probably the most trusted weapon in the women's sports arsenal was the bake sale.21
One clear glimmering of change on the horizon was the 1966 formation of the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW). This group was created to encourage the expansion of opportunities for collegiate women's athletics while also holding on to the more “woman-defined” approach of such groups as its parent organization, the Division for Girls’ and women's Sports (DGWS), and the National Association for the Physical Education of College Women. As part of its mandate to build a governance structure for women's intercollegiate athletics, CIAW began offering national championships in two sports (gymnastics and track and field), with four more quickly added.22
The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), founded in late 1971 and operational the next year with 278 charter members, grew out of CIAW’S realization that women's intercollegiate athletics needed a permanent, national membership organization to coordinate its activities. Some educators applauded the efforts to expand opportunities in new directions, while others were fearful of change. Like its predecessors, the AIAW shared a commitment to a more participation-oriented, less elitist approach to sports that differed fundamentally from the reigning NCAA model that intertwined competition, winning, and commercialization. As the AIAW stated in a May 1974 position paper, “The sense of enjoyment, self confidence and physical well being derived from demanding one’s best performance in a sport situation is a meaningful experience for the athlete. These inner satisfactions are the fundamental motivation for participation in sports. Therefore, programs in an educational setting should have these benefits as primary goals.” Another major AIAW goal, in the words of historian Mary Jo Festle, was “whatever the direction of women's intercollegiate sports, it was women who should determine it.”23
Participation in the Olympics was another area of postwar American society that showed glimmerings of change for women athletes. The cause? The Cold War and the need to stand up to the Russians, especially in the increasingly symbolic medal count. Once the Soviet Union entered the Olympics in 1952, its state-supported athletes enjoyed strong success against American amateur competitors who were basically left to fend for themselves in terms of coaching and training facilities. As Sports Illustrated put it on a 1963 cover featuring a Soviet Bloc athlete: “Why Can't We Beat this Girl?” Since women's sports were such a low priority in the United States, American competitors had little hope for success, except in individual cases of outstanding talent such as Andrea Mead Lawrence in skiing, Tenley Albright in figure skating, Donna de Varona in swimming, and Wilma Rudolph in track. A $500,000 grant in 1960 from Doris Duke Cromwell, heir to the Duke tobacco fortune, to encourage training and coaching for potential women Olympians was a hopeful sign of more resources to come, as well as another indication that the most extreme hostility to female competition was receding, at least when it came to elite athletes.24
The success of Wilma Rudolph at the 1960 Rome Olympics confirmed the dominant role that African American women played in track and field, a trend that had its roots in the interwar years. As part of their anticompetitive campaign in the 1920s and 1930s, white physical education leaders deemed track events “too physical” for most girls and participation plummeted. Into this vacuum stepped the athletic departments of small, historically black colleges and universities in the South, especially Tuskegee Institute and Tennessee State University, ushering in several decades of athletic dominance by black women track athletes. In 1948 Tuskegee high jumper Alice Coachman became the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal, in fact the only American woman that year to bring home gold. Tennessee State Tigerbelle Wilma Rudolph won a bronze medal in Melbourne in 1956 and then three gold medals in Rome four years later; in 1956 fellow Tennessee State alum Willye White won a silver medal in the long jump. Except in the African American community, this link between college sports and the Olympics was an anomaly until well into the 1970s when Title IX-supported scholarship athletes began to predominate in Olympic sports such as basketball, volleyball, and rowing. And yet it foreshadowed another Title IX pattern—the channeling of African American athletes into a tiny number of sports, mainly basketball and track and field.25
The publicity Rudolph received as an African American athlete paralleled the attention that Althea Gibson received when she broke the color line in tennis in the 1950s. Unlike track stars, Althea Gibson’s athletic talent was not nurtured in a historically black college but in Harlem, where she honed her tournament skills in the all-black American Tennis Association. With the support of Alice Marble, in 1950 she became the first African American to play in the national championships at Forest Hills, losing in the second round. Despite her size (she was five feet ten, very tall for a player at that time) and athletic style of play, her career languished. Her breakthrough came in 1955 when the State Department invited her to be part of a goodwill tour to Southeast Asia. In 1957 Gibson, then twenty-nine years old, won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, repeating both crowns the next year before retiring from amateur competitive tennis because, in her trenchant observation, “I couldn't eat trophies.” Although a reluctant civil rights trailblazer, Gibson’s triumphs opened further doors for black athletes and indirectly helped to challenge the racism and segregation of postwar America.26
The Cold War and the poor showing of American athletes in the postwar Olympics also provided the backdrop for a new focus on physical fitness in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956 President Dwight Eisenhower created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness with a broad mandate to investigate “whether American youth was adequately and properly prepared—in a physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual sense—for the challenges that history is presenting to our civilization.” Although performance standards were consistently lower for girls than boys (for example, only ten sit-ups instead of fourteen), girls as well as boys were expected to meet minimum standards of fitness as judged by a set of standardized tests. The administration of John F. Kennedy ramped up the focus on fitness as part of its effort to reinvigorate American society with the New Frontier. The overall message of these campaigns that fitness for girls was just as important to the nation as fitness for boys provided yet another boost to the emerging demand for women's sports.27
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, there were many other stirrings underway for women's sports, although they were scattered and not necessarily seen yet as part of a widespread trend:
In 1967 Kathri
ne Switzer registered for the Boston Marathon as K. Switzer and completed the race despite an official’s attempt to push her off the course; women were allowed to officially register in 1972.
Bernice Gera began her quest to be the first female baseball umpire in 1968.
Mary Bacon and Robyn Smith invaded the male world of jockeys.
Vicky Brown served as the coxswain of the University of Washington men’s crew in 1972 until she was ruled ineligible by the NCAA.
Joan Joyce and Donna Lopiano led the Stratford Raybestos Bra-kettes to repeated victories in the women's National Softball Tournament.
The Virginia Slims professional tennis tour debuted in 1970.
The DGWS issued a research report edited by Dorothy Harris on women in sports in 1971 which challenged many of the stereotypes limiting women's participation.
The New York Board of Regents approved coed competition in noncontact sports in 1971, in effect overturning a 1912 regulation that barred women's varsity sports.28
By 1972, the year Title IX was passed and Billie Jean King was named Sports Illustrated’s first-ever Sportswoman of the Year, women's sports were ready to pop. Journalist Candace Lyle Hogan captured it perfectly: “Fueled by an almost chemical interaction of a federal anti-sex discrimination law, the women's liberation movement, and what is called the temper of the times, women's sports took off like a rocket in 1972.”29
IN 1973 ONE OF THE hottest topics across the country besides the upcoming Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs match was whether girls should be allowed to play Little League baseball. That summer eleven-year-old Maria Pepe of Hoboken, New Jersey, tried out for her local team but never played in a game because the national federation threatened to revoke the team’s charter if she did. Supported by the local chapter of the National Organization for Women, Pepe appealed her case to the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights, which ruled in 1974 in her favor with these words: “The institution of Little League is as American as the hot dog and apple pie. There is no reason why that part of Americana should be withheld from girls.” In the wake of the New Jersey decision, Little League reluctantly announced in June 1974 that girls would be allowed to play “because of the changing social climate.” By then it was too late for Maria Pepe, who had aged out of Little League.30
Maria Pepe’s attempt to join Little League in the summer of 1973 brought out the best and worst in a country highly polarized by the escalating battle between the sexes. Amy Dickinson, who became the first girl to actually play Little League when her Tenafly, New Jersey, team defied the national organization, pinpointed the absurdities of adult behavior as only an eleven-year-old could: “They interviewed one man who said he was a coach. He said he didn't want girls on his team because he didn't want to be responsible if a girl got hit between the legs with a ball and he had to run out and pull her pants down. I started to think that maybe some of these people have problems.” Even though Tenafly took a stand in Amy’s support, it wasn't exactly for feminist reasons, as local booster James Tuck let slip: “We just decided we’d rather have a few girls playing than have 360 boys be deprived of playing.… Let the girls play and get it over with. Then they'll just disappear.”31
Tuck wasn't far off the mark: girls did not exactly flock to play Little League baseball. In State College, Pennsylvania, for example, there were only 10 girls out of 205 players on the roster in 1977. Starting in 1974 Little League began its own softball program, whose main effect (and probably its major purpose) was to siphon off the vast majority of girls from baseball. This outcome confirms a pattern often seen in early assaults on the sports status quo: high profile and highly emotional legal cases revolved around girls trying to win access to boys’ teams, not necessarily because they wanted to play with the boys but because those were the only teams available. After the successful and well-publicized legal challenges, girls’ teams often miraculously materialized overnight, in effect reestablishing the sports status quo: boys competing against boys, girls against girls.32
Challenges like Maria Pepe’s to Little League baseball were happening spontaneously all across the country in the early 1970s, not just in recreational leagues but also in schools all the way from elementary to college. Some of these challenges were linked to Title IX, but many more were just spontaneous initiatives as parents and students looked with a critical eye at what was available to girls and said, “This is not fair.” That, of course, is precisely what Title IX said, too, but public awareness of the law was still extremely limited at this point. Instead, the urgency of these demands was linked to the nature of youth and athletic competition, which transcended a specific piece of federal legislation. Kids grow up fast; they can't just put their athletic careers on hold while a case spends five years working its way through the courts. They want action now.33
This sense of urgency helps to explain the dramatic growth in girls’ sports participation that was already underway before Title IX could conceivably have had such a broad national impact. Participation figures from the 1960s and 1970s are not always the most reliable, but the general pattern is clear. Schematically, in 1971, one in thirteen high school athletes were girls; by 1973, almost one in five; by 1974, one in four; and by the end of the decade, one in three (32.3 percent).34 Given that broad public awareness of Title IX’s impact on athletics was negligible until the first months of 1974, the earliest a Title IX boost to participation could be expected would be in the 1974–75 season. According to figures from the National Federation of State High School Associations, the number of girls competing had already increased from 294,015 in 1970–71 to 817,073 in 1972–73, a threefold increase in just two years, and then again to 1,300,109 in 1973–74. The high school increases were especially pronounced in certain sports such as basketball, softball, and track and field. In almost every sport offered, the sharpest increases occurred in the “take-off” period of 1971–74, with continued strong growth until 1977–78, after which the progress leveled off. These dramatic increases occurred at a time when male high school participation rates remained basically stable.35
The changes were just as dramatic at the college level. In intercollegiate athletics, 15,727 women participated in 1966–67, a figure that doubled to 31,852 by 1971–72 and then doubled again by 1976–77 to 64,375; correspondingly, women's percentage of all athletes rose from 12.5 percent in 1966–67, to 15.6 percent in 1971–72, to 27.4 percent in 1976–77. Note that unlike high school girls’ interscholastic opportunities, which basically started at zero before 1970, college women did have some opportunities by the mid-1960s. Still, they experienced similar patterns of steady incremental growth until 1971–72, followed by a period of explosive growth that lasted until 1976–77. Paralleling the experience in high schools, sports such as basketball, field hockey, volleyball, and swimming peaked at that point and then leveled off or declined, although softball, soccer, and especially track and field continued to climb.36
While the changes in women's sports seemed dramatic and revolutionary at the time, in hindsight women's athletics in the 1970s was in many ways more similar to women's sports in the 1950s and 1960s than to what would come later. Ask any female athlete from the 1970s how she would fare in today’s competitive athletic climate, and chances are she'll laugh and say she wouldn't even make the team. Female athletes in the early days of Title IX were practically self-taught and self-coached, getting by on raw talent and a strong desire to compete, unlike today when athletes have often been honing their skills in a specific sport in recreational leagues and summer camps since grade school. Before athletic scholarships became the norm, it was still possible to walk on to a team, or sometimes even start one yourself if there was enough interest. In addition, it was not unusual for female athletes to participate in multiple sports, sometimes as many as three per year. These female athletic pioneers from the 1970s probably came closest to the vaunted ideal of student athletes than at any time before or since.37
Both reflecting the surge forward in participation opportu
nities and encouraging it, print media stories exploded about the hot new topic of women and sports. Sports Illustrated led the way with its three-part series in May and June of 1973; a year later authors Bil Gilbert and Nancy Williamson followed up with a progress report. Newsweek ran a long spread called “Sportswomanlike Conduct” in June 1974. From its inception in 1973, Ms. magazine devoted regular attention to the issue of women in sport, providing updates about breakthroughs and challenges from across the country as well as profiles of emerging female sports stars and sports “foremothers” from the past. Even women's magazines such as Mademoiselle, Seventeen, and Ladies’ Home Journal jumped on the bandwagon. “Move over, guys,” said Seventeen. “The girls are coming—in gym classes and on the playing fields. Your high school sports program will never be the same. It will be better.”38
The new emphasis on sports for women intersected with the fitness craze of the 1970s. The focus on self-fulfillment and personal liberation that characterized the counterculture of the 1960s in turn spawned a new emphasis on recreation and leisure, with sport and fitness seen as positive and enjoyable forms of self-improvement. While only 24 percent of Americans eighteen years and older in 1961 participated in some form of physical activity on a regular basis, by 1979 59 percent of Americans—some 90 million adults—did so, with women's rate of participation climbing more steeply than men’s throughout the 1970s. Millions of health-conscious joggers took to the streets, fueling the running craze of the 1970s. Also on the increase were aerobics, swimming, biking, and a range of activities that made exercise the province of daily life for a broad range of women, not just elite high school and college athletes.39