Game, Set, Match
Page 22
The importance of the Equal Rights Amendment is that it would have enshrined the principle of sex as a suspect qualification in the Constitution, making it extremely difficult to draw such distinctions when it came to legislation or government action. The whole thrust of the ERA, which read in part “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” was to treat individuals equally before the law. Any attempt to classify women and men differently on the basis of sex would have faced strict scrutiny. For example, under the ERA it is extremely likely that both men and women would be subject to a military draft. The ERA would also likely lead to the repeal of the exemption of women from combat.54
Historians debate whether the women's movement chose poorly when it made the Equal Rights Amendment the main focus of its public activism from its passage by Congress in 1972 until its demise in 1982; the debate revolves around both means and ends. Part of the controversy is whether all the resources and time invested in the fight for state ratification, a fight that got harder and ultimately unwinnable once Phyllis Schlafly and other conservative women joined the fray in mid-decade, could have been better spent on other issues. There is also a lingering sense that the ERA had at best symbolic meaning: that its main purpose was to place a general standard of equality in the Constitution rather than to impact individual laws. If the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had already removed most of the outmoded laws that treated women differently, was a constitutional amendment really necessary at all?55
The argument looks different when sports are factored in. While it is true that many legal distinctions between men and women had been chipped away by the 1970s, the one arena where old traditions and stereotypes still reigned practically unchallenged was in sports. Whereas society was no longer willing to prohibit women from being bartenders, exclude them from strenuous jobs, or limit their enrollment in professional schools, it was still willing, indeed eager, to embrace a system for organizing sports that was based on the premise that men and women must be classified separately by sex for the purposes of athletic competition. This is precisely the legal approach that the Title IX athletic regulations took. If the Equal Rights Amendment had been adopted, however, it would have trumped a piece of Congressional legislation.
Is there a possible scenario whereby the courts could have left a sex-segregated athletic system in place despite the ERA? According to a report issued by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1972, the only two permissible exceptions to the ERA would have been the right to personal privacy and situations related to a unique physical characteristic of one sex56 The right to privacy would certainly have allowed segregated locker rooms to continue but does not seem widely applicable to other sports practices. No doubt sports administrators would have tried to argue that sex-segregated teams were related to unique physical characteristics of each sex, the equivalent of the bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) allowed in employment discrimination. The EEOC had initially allowed newspapers to continue to divide ads into “Help Wanted-Female” and “Help Wanted-Male,” supposedly for the convenience of job seekers, until NOW successfully challenged this practice in court. Eventually the EEOC limited the bona fide occupational qualification to cases of extreme sexual differentiation such as sperm donors or wet nurses, which is not much of a precedent for sex-segregated teams. Combined with the string of equal protection cases already creating precedents for a sex-blind approach to sports, a sex-segregated sports system probably would have had a hard time surviving judicial scrutiny if it came up against the ERA.57
Think of it this way. If the Equal Rights Amendment had coasted to approval and become part of the constitution by 1975, as had seemed likely when it was sent to the states just three years earlier, it would have forced HEW and its various constituencies to craft policy with this higher legal standard in mind. Maybe the ERA would have stopped the separate but equal process in its tracks and encouraged the development of an athletic system that was dedicated to the general proposition of integration, not segregation, as the National Organization for Women proposed; less drastically, the amendment might have raised consciousness about some of the unexamined assumptions that underlay the current structure. At the very least, the ERA would have given those trying to expand athletic opportunities for women a much stronger legal weapon to challenge the sports status quo. If this had been the case, perhaps the Equal Rights Amendment would be getting all the credit for the revolution in women's sports today rather than Title IX.
MOST AMERICANS, indeed most citizens around the world, still take it as a given that men and women cannot compete together in sports because men are faster and stronger than women. Why is that allowed to end the discussion? As USA Today columnist Christine Brennan points out, “Stating the obvious fact that women athletes are not as strong and fast as their male counterparts is like criticizing men for not having a body equipped to give birth. There’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.” And yet there is something society can do about it: it can scrutinize the way modern athletics is organized and it can challenge the often untested assumptions and stereotypes that define women as a different—and lesser—category of athletes than men. And one way to do that is to rethink why sports are so deeply divided by gender in the first place. A liberal feminist approach that focuses on athletes as individuals rather than distinct categories of men and women offers a fresh—indeed, radical—perspective.58
Billie Jean King grappled with this question throughout her career. “I see the day coming in sports when we will all be competing on the basis of our individual abilities, not our gender. I see that day coming, and I welcome it,” she said in 1984. In her view, sports competition should be integrated from elementary school on so that girls and boys grow up learning teamwork together and competing on equal terms. “I believe that in every aspect of sports, women would achieve much higher levels of performance if they entered the crucible of competition with men on an open basis, from the beginning and throughout the educational process.” She was certain that if she had had that experience, she would have been “better, faster, and stronger than I am.” How good and how strong? “I may not be the number-one tennis player in the men’s division, but that doesn't mean I couldn't hold my own somewhere in the men’s division. Especially if I had conditioned myself for it for twenty years the way many of the men have.” But King didn't stop there. “There’s no reason why we can't have teams determined by ability, not gender. We might want to change the rules too. Why should every sport be based on speed and strength? There are other sports that can be created that aren't based on those things.”59
In these scattered musings, Billie Jean King raised fundamental and potentially revolutionary questions about how sport and gender are organized in modern society. Why are sports divided by gender rather than by ability, size, or other factors? Why do sports privilege male attributes of speed and strength rather than the endurance or agility more common to women? Would a different array of sports bring different outcomes? What if there are in fact more similarities between the athletic abilities of the two sexes than differences? And if some women can hold their own against men, then what is the justification for a competitive structure such as Title IX’s that is basically constructed around the principle of separate but equal? That was the basis of apartheid in South Africa, King noted pointedly. Her answer was clear and unequivocal: “‘Separate but equal’ means women will always be second-class citizens in sport.”60
Sports historian Barbara Gregorich put it bluntly: “If baseball had been open to women for the last 150 years, we would have already seen female major leaguers. The game is closed not because women can't play, but because men in power don't want women around.” In turn, because the current sports system reinforces the differences between the sexes, it serves to reify the notion that men are inherently stronger and faster than women and that any ideas o
f women being able to compete with men would founder on their physical limitations. Who benefits from this argument? Men, of course, and men’s traditional hegemony of sports, although women too for their own reasons have colluded in keeping the sexes segregated when it comes to physical activity. Title IX has also played a key—and often unrecognized—role in propping up this sexist system, especially with its contact sports exclusion: as Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano argue, “The bottom line was that Title IX’s permission to segregate contact sports effectively led to universal sex-segregation in virtually all sports.” The end result is the same: since the sports world is constructed to maximize rather than minimize the differences between the sexes, how would anyone know what women are capable of?61
Other than the Catholic Church or the American prison system, it is hard to think of a modern institution more deeply gendered than sports. As sports scholar Ellen Staurowsky has noted, the “athletic establishment is without peer in higher education and society at large with regard to its use of gender marking. The athletic landscape is literally and figuratively outfitted in symbols of ‘pink’ and ‘blue.’ “She points to the persistent use of gender references in team designations (like Tennessee’s Lady Volunteers or Delta State’s Lady Statesmen), job titles such as senior woman administrator, and of course the existence of men’s and women's teams in the same sport. “These symbols serve as signposts, directing attention time and again to a consideration of gender difference,” she concludes. Boys and girls are channeled into acceptable sports by gender: football and baseball for boys; gymnastics, field hockey, and softball for girls. Even when they play the same sport, their experience still varies by gender: a slightly smaller basketball, a different lacrosse basket, a prohibition on body checking, or different distances to the target. Needless to say, the men’s sport invariably sets the standard while the women play by different, “girls’ “rules. With the exception of pairs figure skating and mixed doubles in tennis, feminist scholar Catharine Stimpson points out, “Today, in the United States, men are from football stadiums, women are not.”62
Mary Jo Kane has noted how sports vigilantly reinforce the notion that differences between male and female athletic performance are grounded in the physical body, which in turn is deployed to provide “incontrovertible evidence of male superiority” because of the emphasis on factors of height, scores, speeds, and distances that seem to confirm this superiority. “It’s a short leap from seeing men as physically superior to seeing men as superior, period,” notes scholar Susan Birrell. And yet sport, like everything else, is constructed, not natural. Contemporary society values the burst of speed that wins the 100-meter dash over the endurance that wins a 100-mile race, in large part because speed is what men excel at and endurance is more applicable to female bodies. With the conversation-stopping statement that no woman will ever run the 100-meter dash faster than a man, so don't even talk about women's sports as being on a par with men’s, it is very hard to look beyond the binaries that divide the world, especially the sports world, into male and female versions.63
One way to destabilize male advantage is to redefine sport to focus more on participation and less on winning. Only a tiny number of people will ever win Wimbledon or a gold medal at the Olympics, but that does not stop millions from competing at their own level in sports of their own choice—are they any less deserving to be called athletes? This is what Simone de Beauvoir was getting at in her often-quoted remark from The Second Sex: “And in sports the end in view is not success independent of physical equipment; it is rather the attainment of perfection within the limitations of each physical type: the featherweight boxing champion is as much a champion as the heavyweight; the woman skiing champion is not the inferior of the faster male champion: they belong to two different classes.” Less emphasis on the first person (usually male) to get to the finish line and more on the back-of-the-pack runners, male and female, would spread out the experience and enjoyment of athletics, rather than just limit it to a winner. Note that focusing on participation rather than winning as the core definition of sport is very similar to the philosophy that reigned in women's athletics from the 1920s until Title IX destabilized the field, so there are historical precedents for this approach.64
Another way to challenge male hegemony is to look at how sports are organized. For example, there is a tendency to think of the range of current sports as fixed, even though many of the most popular sports, notably football, basketball, and baseball, date only to the nineteenth century. It is hardly a coincidence, Michael Messner points out, that “the most popular and valued sports (football, basketball, ice hockey) are historically organized around the most extreme possibilities of men’s bodies.” In fact the trend of late twentieth-and early twenty-first century professional sport seems to be toward even more brute physicality, as witnessed by the expanding girth of National Football League players over the last thirty years. Could this hyperemphasis on male size and strength be a reaction to the inroads of women into sports? Mariah Burton Nelson thinks so. In her pithy summation, “The stronger women get, the more men love football.”65
What this invested belief in male physical superiority does is inflate enormously the differences between the sexes and erase or ignore their commonalities. Mary Jo Kane’s pathbreaking 1995 article, “Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sport as a Continuum,” offers a different way of seeing and interpreting evidence that is right before our eyes: “In spite of all efforts to the contrary, there exists today a sport continuum in which many women routinely outperform many men and, in some cases, women outperform most—if not all—men in a variety of sports and physical skills/activities.” It does not necessarily follow, therefore, that every elite male can outperform every elite female or that even marginal males can outperform the best female. And yet if men’s and women's sports are kept rigidly separate, then we never have the chance to actually see women outperforming men in sports venues. Kane concludes, “The acknowledgement of such a continuum could provide a direct assault on traditional beliefs about sport—and gender itself—as an inherent, oppositional binary that is grounded in biological difference. In short, an awareness of sport as a continuum of physical, athletic competence could serve as an important vehicle for resistance and transformation.”66
All this has an enormous amount to do with the legacy of Billie Jean King and the lessons of Title IX for the current organization of the world of sports. Most fundamentally, it challenges a strict division into men’s and women's sports as often unnecessary, counterproductive, or misguided. What would a competitive sports structure look like that downplayed gender distinctions instead of institutionalizing them? Here are just a few examples of how gender could be deemphasized in sports:
In sports such as riflery, archery, sailing, and equestrian, where sex is irrelevant, field a totally coeducational team.
In sports such as track, golf, cycling, or swimming, have men and women compete in separate events and then combine both scores for the whole team. Encourage relay teams or match play that include both men and women. “In the Olympics, why not Carl Lewis passing off [the relay baton] to Flo Jo [Florence Griffith Joyner]?” Billie Jean King asks.67
Remove any restrictions on women competing in so-called contact sports and synchronize the rules so that men’s and women's versions of the game are the same. For example, in ice hockey, either allow body checking for women or prohibit it for men.
Instead of coaching teams separately, have the coaches of the men’s and women's teams work collaboratively, dividing up tasks and sharing duties. Ditto those who provide training and medical services. Having women coach male athletes (as Billie Jean King did when she was the player-coach of the Philadelphia Freedom) would represent a huge step in breaking down prejudice against women in sports leadership positions.
Follow the example of sports such as boxing, rowing, and wrestling, which organize events by weight and size. No one expected lightweight Sugar R
ay Leonard to box against heavyweight Muhammad Ali; institute similar categories where size is a significant factor. “It’s really simple,” Billie Jean King says. “Your body size determines what sports you can do. If you’re a boy and you weigh 150 pounds, you’re not going to play football; you might become a gymnast.”68
Remove unnecessary or arbitrary variations in rules, such as having men badminton players go to 15 points while women stop at 11, dividing basketball periods differently in men’s or women's games, or having different numbers of referees for men’s and women's games.
Once you really look closely at how sport is gendered, the list of offenses both large and small is mind boggling. While it is hard to imagine a sports revolution being started simply by changing the length of a basketball period or fielding a mixed-gender archery team, it’s a start. Or more to the point: the realization that these gendered assumptions are so deeply imbedded in sports as to be practically invisible is the first step toward unmasking them and then trying to work toward a more equitable system that treats participants as athletes first, and as members of a specific gender second, if at all.
Once again Billie Jean King’s beloved World Team Tennis provides a compelling and far-sighted model. With its roster equally divided between male and female players, and the outcome of the match therefore determined equally by the contributions of both sexes, Team Tennis turned an individual sport into a team endeavor committed to the principle of equal representation without distinctions based on gender. “In Team Tennis, if you help your teammate—it doesn't matter which gender—then everybody wins,” King reasoned, before taking her conclusion one step further: “That’s the kind of teamwork I want to see happen in the business world, in marriage, and everything. Girls and boys have not been together enough, especially in sports.” On another occasion she extrapolated how “boys and girls cooperating, side-by-side, against the same opponent” might play out in real life: “Imagine a kid walking into a gym and seeing boys and girls on the same playing field. That’s total gender equity.” It is, she proudly announced, “the essence of who I am,” and a core principle of her philosophies both of sport and feminism.69