Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  The crass commercialism and focus on winning that largely characterized male organized sporting activity were a real turn-off to an emerging feminist movement built around the ethos of cooperation and sisterhood, where the issue of competition between and among women at times functioned almost as a feminist taboo. Here is how the 1973 edition of the Boston women's Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves described the contemporary world of sports and women's role in it: “But given the American world of athletics, based as it is on the most aggressive, dog-eat-dog patterns of male competitiveness and greedily engaged in marketing the successful athlete like any other product in our society, we do not want to see women triumphing over women in ugly, masculine ways. Instead of turning talented people into superstars, we favor providing opportunity and encouragement for all.”20 Some feminist softball teams, for example, experimented with rotating positions, letting everyone play equal amounts of time regardless of skill, and treating the other team like sisters by sharing the same bench rather than sitting on opposite sides of the field. Their noncompetitive mantra: “The obsession with winning is a vestige of patriarchy.”21

  Also unappealing was the connection between sport, war, and aggression: many women viewed all three with suspicion and distrust, especially while the Vietnam War still dragged on. Of course, just because sports have traditionally been portrayed as patriarchal and violent doesn't mean that that is the only way they have existed or could operate. “To dismiss sports as a product of a capitalistic, patriarchal society is to accept things as they are rather than work toward things as they might be,” Hollis Elkins observed with a note of disappointment in 1978. Donna Lopiano made a similar point even more forcefully: “Why any feminist would deny the validity of participation in a highly competitive activity that produces strong women who are able to resist oppression or who have the guts to uphold principle is beyond me. Sport itself is not ‘bad.’ The values men have brought to it and inserted as ‘primary’ are an anathema. Don't discard the baby (sport) with the bath water (exploitive values).”22

  Besides the view of sports as violent and male defined, there is also a lingering suspicion that perhaps sports were not high on the feminist agenda because so many of the early movement leaders were physically inactive and/or had no exposure to or interest in sports. Remember that one of the key slogans of the movement was “the personal is political.” Remember also that many of the new movement’s leaders were based in New York City, hardly a hotbed of athleticism for women. If a budding feminist happened already to be involved or interested in athletic activity, she would be more likely to make the link between feminist ideology and the practice of sport. If sport was an alien foreign culture, however, then there was little reason to expect that it would find a prominent place on the feminist agenda. As sports theorist M. Ann Hall later put it, “Female bodies have always been central to feminism, but sporting bodies have not,” an insight with profound consequences for the revolution in women's sports and women's lives in the 1970s.23

  THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION for Women (NOW) offers one example of how the women's movement approached the issue of women and sports in the 1970s.24 Founded in 1966, NOW did not have a task force on sports in operation until the summer of 1973, when national coordinator Judy Wen-ning reported 130 members and a goal of having a sports committee in every chapter. Title IX enforcement was the task force’s top priority, followed by a long list of goals, including equal access to recreational facilities; elimination of discrimination in all school athletic programs; development of a positive image of women in sports; unbiased media coverage; public support for women's sports development, including encouraging local chapters to help develop programs for girls and women with an emphasis on “health, enjoyment, and physical fitness”; and the encouragement, collection, and dissemination of research on women and sports. That ambitious agenda was matched by a budget of only $705, typical of the way in which NOW task forces were often given broad mandates but little support to carry out their goals.25NOW never developed an official sports policy statement, and by 1977 the task force was no longer in operation. NOW later tried to take credit for being in the lead on Title IX (“Passage of this legislation was one of our proudest moments”), but such a statement vastly overinflates its involvement at the time.26

  With the proviso that sports were never a high priority for NOW at the national level, there is intriguing evidence from the 1970s that the organization was ready to leap into the debate about how best to provide athletic equality for girls and women with a stand on sports that was far in advance of conventional wisdom. While admitting that women might need sex-segregated programs in the short term until they were able to come into their own athletically, NOW activists envisioned a sports program that treated women as individuals. NOW'S stance was firm and unequivocal: “NOW is opposed to any regulation which precludes eventual integration. Regulations that ‘protect’ girls and/or women are against NOW goals and are contradictory to our stand on the ERA. Of course one has to be prepared to answer the question, ‘Do you want your daughter to box?’ The answer is of course, ‘MY daughter is the one to decide that, not HEW!’”27

  NOW’S disavowal of laws designed to “protect” women or treat them differently from men was very much wrapped up in the long and contentious debate about protective legislation that had divided the postsuffrage women's movement practically from the day the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in 1923. Protective legislation for women emerged in the Progressive era as a way of guaranteeing better working conditions for women. Because of working women's supposed physical inferiority and status as “future mothers of the race,” there was support, both judicial and political, for easing their burdens through legislation such as limiting work to eight hours a day, guaranteeing a minimum wage, setting limits on the amount of weight they could lift on the job, and banning night work out of concerns for women's physical safety after dark. While some reformers no doubt believed that working women were indeed weaker and in need of more protection than men, they also had an instrumental reason for focusing legislation only on women: no early twentieth-century court would have upheld such laws for men. In the view of the courts, such laws were infringements on the right of workers and employers to enter into contracts, precisely the reasoning the court applied in Lochner v. New York (1905) to strike down a law limiting the hours of bakers in New York State. Just three years later, however, swayed by a brief submitted by Louis Brandeis and the National Consumers’ League documenting how long hours damaged the health and family roles of women workers, the Supreme Court upheld a ten-hour day for Oregon’s female workers in Muller v. Oregon (1908).28

  When the ERA was introduced in 1923, its language threatened this tradition of protective legislation. Some feminists felt the broad constitutional protection of the ERA was more important than specific laws, while others were unwilling to give up hard-won reforms for an abstract ideal. The impasse stood until the 1930s when New Deal legislation such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in effect extended those protections to all workers. Still many women activists, especially those in the labor movement but also including many reformers, refused to put aside their opposition to the ERA. This rift played itself out from 1961 to 1963 in the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which proposed a range of recommendations to advance women's rights but declined to endorse the ERA. The tide was turning, however, and by the late 1960s most women activists had concluded that protective legislation was no longer necessary. In turn, they rallied, although not always enthusiastically, around the ERA.29

  NOW leaders were steeped in this debate over protective legislation, and it almost certainly influenced their stand on sex segregation versus integration in sports. To their minds, the attempt to segregate women's sports into a separate track because of assumptions about physical limits and inferiority must have sounded distressingly similar to the old stereotypes that had suggested that women workers needed special protection solely
because they were women. For example, laws limiting women to lifting thirty pounds on the job (the weight of a small child many a mother has picked up) or preventing the hiring of women with preschool children were not only based on outmoded ideas of women's physical capabilities but also hindered women in the workplace by keeping them out of higher-paying jobs. Instead NOW proposed that women be treated as individuals, not members of a second sex; if any protection or special circumstances were needed, let them be provided on an individual, not group, basis. “SEPARATE IS NEVER EQUAL!!!!!” proclaimed Pennsylvania chapter president Ellie Smeal emphatically in 1973.30

  A good place to see how this stance played itself out in terms of sports policy is with the comments submitted to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) in October 1974 on the proposed Title IX regulations. These comments were prepared by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and NOW'S Project on Equal Education Rights, with legal advice from the Center for National Policy Review in Washington. Other women's organizations such as the women's Equity Action League or the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) submitted detailed comments as well, focusing on questions such as equal access, treatment, and resources, as well as demanding leadership roles for women in administering the new programs, but they accepted the basic overall premise behind the existing sports structure. NOW charted a very different course.31

  While encouraged that the guidelines called for coeducational physical education classes, NOW was disturbed that the section on competitive athletics rested on a “separate but equal” doctrine, “without any indication that we should be working towards the day when absolute nondiscrimination—full integration—is possible.” NOW'S comments stressed that equality in competitive athletics must address both tangible and intangible factors, including the skill level on a team, since the more skilled the team, the better the athlete. As they put it pointedly: “If men’s and women's teams are fully equal, including skill level, there is no justification for segregation. Inequality, whether because of differences in past training, interest, or physical abilities, is the only justification for segregation.” Reminding policymakers that there was not yet conclusive evidence on whether current differences between male and female athletes were the result of innate physical differences or differences in training and expectations, NOW insisted that the policy rest on a presumption of sexual equality rather than an unproved assumption of sexual inequality.

  Certain elite female athletes could already compete with their male peers, but they would be the exceptions. So NOW hedged its bets just a bit, asking that schools also provide guarantees “that where such equality is not now a reality, females will still be assured of an equal opportunity for the physical and psychological rewards of athletic competition.” Finally, the regulation should ask recipients to do everything in their power “to overcome the effects of past discrimination with a view toward making complete integration possible as quickly as possible.”

  How would such a plan actually work? NOW proposed that each school establish a nondiscriminatory “unitary” team open to both sexes “in each sport and at each level of competition in which the recipient wishes to provide competitive athletic opportunities.” However, when a unitary team resulted in a predominantly single-sex team “because of discrimination, difference in training, interest, or physical attributes, or any other factor limiting the presence of members of one sex on the team,” then the institution must also set up a separate team for the sex so limited. The team must be equal to the predominantly single-sex team in areas such as facilities, coaching, expenditures, and prestige. At the point when the nondiscriminatory unitary team was no longer predominantly single-sexed, there would no longer be a need to field an additional separate team.

  The call for a “unitary” team open to both sexes was controversial, especially among leaders in the field of women's physical education who feared that institutions would simply open all the men’s teams to women and say that they were legally providing equal opportunities to both sexes. Since only the most talented girls would be able to make the boys’ teams, girls might actually end up with even fewer participation opportunities than before. How real a threat this would have been is hard to gauge. Given the explosive demands for access to sports by girls and their parents in the 1970s, it is hard to imagine them being satisfied by having a token girl or two on the tennis or swimming team. In any case, NOW always took pains to say that this was not their only solution. As Anne Grant, coordinator of NOW'S Education Task Force, wrote to J. Stanley Pottinger of the Office for Civil Rights in January 1973, “I must emphatically add that a single, integrated varsity team is not our ideal for public athletic programs. It is merely one model which will remove sex discrimination from athletic programs as they are now structured.”32

  The main idea behind the unitary team was to give the gifted female athlete a chance to compete against her peers, who in this case would be boys. These girls were the ones most disadvantaged by a separate but equal approach; correspondingly, they had the most to gain from an integrated, gender-blind policy. NOW was not just interested in the elite athlete, however; its activists also wanted to increase opportunities “to reach the greatest number of students possible.”33NOW seemed to have in mind a dramatic expansion of intramural sports geared toward developing the skills and meeting the needs of many “average” athletes, male and female, in contrast to men’s varsity programs that spent everything on an “elite” few. In this respect, NOW was in line with the philosophy of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which preferred a more participation-based model of athletics for women and men rather than the competitive approach traditionally pursued by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.34

  NOW clearly believed that there was just a short window of opportunity to make the point about integration. In the past, there had been hardly any sports programs for girls; now it was clear there would be many more. Don't get caught up in separate programs for women, NOW activists warned, because instead of being temporary solutions while girls and women developed the necessary skills and encouragement to compete with boys and men, such programs will become just as entrenched as the system they were supposed to be challenging. A position paper on sports drafted around the same time by the Pennsylvania chapter of NOW made a similar point: “The sexists of the world will push right now for sex-segregated programs and will try to make these attractive to girls because they do not want them to venture forth in the vicinity of their limited, superboy varsity programs. We must not play into their hands.” The Pennsylvania chapter drew an interesting parallel to affirmative action: “We all know that a purely affirmative action program which had catch-up attributes must have a ‘phase out’ stage. We feel that the present separate but equal programs in reality do not have a phase-out stage.” As they cogently realized, “we must move quickly into the vacuum of promoting integrated activities wherever possible so that sex-segregated does not become the absolute de facto rule of sports in our state.” That, of course, is precisely what happened.35

  What all these NOW positions have in common is a willingness to step outside the box and think about sports in new and different ways. There certainly were benefits to an outsider’s perspective when it came to identifying alternatives to old, entrenched customs, but they came with costs, both financial and political. To truly implement the NOW vision of a unitary team, a separate team for the underrepresented sex, and opportunities for a much broader range of intramural athletes grouped by ability and interest would have been prohibitively expensive for schools at a time when they were wondering how they were going to find the funds to start up even rudimentary programs for girls. women's physical education leaders were especially threatened by the stance on integration because it would wipe out the carefully guarded enclave of women's sports they had painstakingly built over the years. In frustration, sports leaders and school administrators alike accused these NOW activists of not knowing anything
about sports, which was not actually that far off the mark. For the most part, NOW'S national leaders came to the issue intellectually rather than from actual practical experience or interest in sports or competitive athletics. They approached access to sports as an abstract problem to be solved, rather than a real-world situation with deeply imbedded practices that would be difficult to uproot. In other words, they weren't jocks. Billie Jean King had an even better characterization: she called their approach thinking “from the neck up.”36

  Nor was there ever a real chance that HEW would adopt such a controversial and wide-ranging proposal, given its politically driven need to craft a compromise that addressed the urgent and often conflicting needs of the wide array of sports, education, and feminist constituencies with a stake in the legislation. Gwen Gregory, the lawyer at HEW who was deeply involved in drafting the Title IX regulations on athletics, called the NOW brief “intellectually the best one, without any question,” but “completely unworkable in the real world”: “it was 50 teams in every sport and that way everyone has a team on which they can play, and they compete for the team. Well, legally, it’s wonderful but it’s impossible to carry out.” Like school administrators, Gregory concluded that the NOW staff in Washington knew practically nothing about sports. In the end, “we just completely discarded it, because there was no way we could require something like that.”37