Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  71 Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets, x, 46, 82. For more on Rene Muth Portland, see Byrne, O God of Players.

  72 For their personal stories of sexual harassment by their coaches, see “My Coach Says He Loves Me” in Mariah Burton Nelson, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994); and Leslie Heywood, Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete's Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Peter Bodo, The Courts of Babylon: Tales of Greed and Glory in the Harsh New World of Professional Tennis (New York: Scribner, 1995), discusses the problem in tennis. See also Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets, 191, 200.

  73 Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets, 71, quotes Martina Navratilova in the video Out for a Change: Addressing Homophobia in women's Sports (1992): “We should make men coach in those things.”

  74 Festle, Playing Nice, 185–86, 267–68.

  75 Lucy Jane Bledsoe, “Team Sports Brought Us Together,” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 4 (Spring 1997): 18–20.

  76 Gerald R. Gems, Linda J. Borish, and Gertrud Pfister, Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 2008).

  77 Lynn Glatzer, “women's Professional Basketball: Anatomy of a Failure,” womenSports, December 1977, 19–21; Grace Lichtenstein, “women's Pro Basketball League: The New Million Dollar Baby,” Ms., March 1980, 70.

  78 Thomas Boswell, “WBL Pioneers: A Cold-Gym Life; Low-rent Lives Between Jumpers and Drives,” Washington Post, February 25, 1979, G1. See also Grundy and Shackelford, Shattering the Glass, 183–87.

  79 Lichtenstein, “women's Pro Basketball League,” 72.

  80 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, May 1976, 4; King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, December 1977, 4; King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, November, 1975, 4; Grace Lichtenstein, “Women on the Diamond,” New York Times Magazine, August 4, 1974, 14–18; Jane Bosveld, “The Little-Known World of Big-time Softball,” Ms., June 1983, 63.

  81 Christine Terp, “A Whole New Game?” Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 1981, 12.

  82 Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Working Women: Making It in Sports,” Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1974, 63–64.

  83 For golf, see Crosset, Outsiders in the Clubhouse; and Melanie Hauser, “Selling Their Game,” in Smith, Nike Is a Goddess. See also “Dinah's Space: An Interview with Television's Most Famous Amateur Golfer,” womenSports, April 1975, 29–30.

  84 Janet Guthrie, Janet Guthrie: Life at Full Throttle (Wilmington, Del.: Sport Media Publishing, 2005), 382; introduction by Billie Jean King in ibid., xii. Given the miniscule chance to make a living as a professional athlete, some women found alternative career paths in broadcasting and journalism, although they had to fight for acceptance in these male-dominated fields. Probably fewer than thirty women nationwide worked fulltime as sportswriters on major newspapers or magazines by the end of the 1970s, including Jane Gross at Newsday, Robin Herman at the New York Times, Lawrie Mifflin at the New York Daily News, Betty Cuniberti at the Washington Post, Sheila Moran at the Los Angeles Times, Stephanie Salter at the San Francisco Examiner, and Sheryl Flatow at UPI. Jane Gross, “Female Sportswriters Make Their Mark,” New York Times, May 26, 1988, 23; Melissa Ludtke, “Women in Locker Rooms: It's no longer a laughing matter,” St. Petersburg Times, October 14, 1990, 1D. In 1978 Melissa Ludtke of Sports Illustrated successfully sued to win women reporters access to locker rooms. Full documentation of the case is found in Melissa Ludtke's papers at the Schlesinger Library.

  85 Kathrine Switzer, Marathon Woman (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), has a picture of the outfit.

  86 “Function First,” women's Sports and Fitness, January/February 1988, 63. See also the ad for the JogBra in women's Sports, February 1979.

  87 “A Sporting Chance: Women gain equal footing in area of athletic apparel,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 27, 1990, 5. See also Candace Campbell, “Running a Clothes Biz,” women's Sport, March 1983, 46, on the company. Missy Park followed a similar pattern when she founded her company, Title 9, in Berkeley in 1987. See Beatrice Motamedi, “Sports Gear Just for Women: Mail Order Firm in Berkeley Carves Out a New Niche,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 1991, B1. Both companies are still going strong today, and mainstays of my running gear.

  88 Quoted in Longman, The Girls of Summer, 281.

  Chapter Five

  1 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, November 1977, 4. For a historical overview of the Houston Conference, see Marjorie J. Spruill, “Gender and America's Right Turn: The 1977 IWY Conferences and the Polarization of American Politics,” in Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Archival material is found in the papers of the National Commission on the Observance of International women's Year, SL. See also the PBS documentary Sisters of’77 (2005); and Gloria Steinem, “Houston and History,” Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Henry Holt, 1983).

  2 See Lisa Tetrault, “The Memory of a Movement: Woman Suffrage and Reconstruction America, 1865–1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2004), on why we can't call Seneca Falls the first women's rights convention, and certainly not the first in the world. See also Lisa Levenstein, “Rethinking the Origins of Woman's Rights: Gender and Nineteenth-Century Political Culture,” Reviews in American History 34 (March 2006): 28–33.

  3 National Commission on the Observance of International women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978). This account is drawn from the section in the official report on the Torch Relay, 192–203.

  4 Ibid., 200.

  5 The picture is reproduced in ibid., 128. According to the official report, the photos were so striking that they appeared on the front pages of many newspapers that otherwise ignored the conference.

  6 King, Publisher's Letter, November 1977; National Commission on the Observance of International women's Year, The Spirit of Houston, 34. Sports activists had convened a caucus on women in sports and circulated various sports resolutions at the conference but failed to mobilize enough support or interest to press the issue. Carole Oglesby, who served as the IWY sports consultant, concluded ruefully, “When the torch run was completed, and the ‘real conference’ begun, the concerns of sports women and health/physical educators were deemed too trivial to be added to the deliberation.” Carole A. Oglesby, “Coping with Trauma: Staying the Course,” in Pirkko Markula, ed., Feminist Sport Studies: Sharing Experiences of Joy and Pain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 106.

  7 Measuring the role that sports played in second-wave feminism will have to wait until more local studies and oral histories explore whether this issue had a more broad-based resonance at the local level than with national leadership, but there are intriguing suggestions that sports-based activism was more likely to be undertaken at the local level, acting out of concern for specific issues or problems in their communities. For example, the New Jersey chapter of NOW supported Maria Pepe in her effort to play Little League baseball in 1973; in Dayton, Ohio, NOW activism on Title IX resulted in S3 million of funding being put in escrow between 1975 and 1977; WEAL members took the lead in filing Title IX complaints or other legal challenges in Texas, South Carolina, NewJersey, and Pennsylvania. For glimpses of how second-wave feminism played out at the grassroots level, see Judith Ezekiel, Feminism in the Heartland (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2002); and Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).

  8 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, August 1976, 4; Selena Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005), 63; Robert Lipsyte, “Billie Jean,” New York Times, August 27, 1970, 59; Frank Deford, “Mrs. Billie Jean King,” Sports Illustrated, May 19, 1975, 82.

  9
Mark Asher, “Abortion Made Possible Mrs. King's Top Year,” Washington Post, February 22, 1972, D1. The quote continues: “Rod Laver when he won the Grand Slam they wrote about him as a tennis player. The only way I get into things is because of my connection with women's Lib. I run just as many laps as he does. I train just as hard. women's Lib should be secondary.” See also BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 126.

  10 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, July 1976, 4; BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 16–17.

  11 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 142; “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” Playboy, March 1975, 58; Cori Planck, “Portrait of a Legend: Billie Jean King Talks About the Game She Loves and the World She Changed,” Lesbian News, April 1999, 18–19. King is making a larger point about fighting for equality, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation: “We have to be fighting for equality for everyone. I always wonder if the world was in reverse.… I hope I would fight for the equality of men”

  12 Billie Jean King, Publisher's Letter, womenSports, August, 1976, 4; Bud Collins, “Billie Jean King Evens the Score,” Ms., July 1973, 43; Grace Lichtenstein, “Straight Talk from Billie Jean King,” Seventeen, May 1974, 38, 43. “My husband's the one who thinks women's lib is really great,” she said in 1970. “He feels everybody should be equal” (Lipsyte, “Billie Jean,” 59). See also Judy Klemesrud, “Billie Jean King Scores Ace at Fund-Raising Rally,” New York Times, September 21, 1972, 24.

  13 In Deford, “Mrs. Billie Jean King,” 82, she went into a diatribe against NOW for requesting ten press passes to a tournament. In her 1982 autobiography, she even talked about being a “cult figure”—”the Feminist Athletic Doll”—who was “lumped with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug” (BJK, Billie Jean, 161).

  14 BJK, Billie Jean (1974), 138. Or as she said in Curry Kirkpatrick, “The Ball in Two Different Courts,” Sports Illustrated, December 25, 1972, 33: “In my work for the women's Political Caucus, I think of myself as a woman, not an athlete, and yet what makes me valuable is that I’m a tennis star. It's an athlete's privilege, like anybody else's, to speak out on issues.”

  15 Grace L. Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby: The Inside Story of the Women in Pro Tennis (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 150; Jane Leavy, “Whatever Happened to Peaches Bartkowicz?” womenSports, January 1978, 20–24, 46–47.

  16 Grace Lichtenstein, “Billie Jean King, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Me,” Redbook, November 1974, 104–5; “Two Pros,” Time, March 20, 1972, 103.

  17 Hollis Elkins, “Time for a Change: women's Athletics and the women's Movement,” Frontiers 3 (1978): 22–23. See also Mary Jo Festle, Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in women's Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Ying Wushanley, Playing Nice and Losing: The Strugglefor Control of women's Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960–2000 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004).

  18 Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby, 150; Dan Wakefield, “My Love Affair with Billie Jean King,” Esquire, October 1974, 386; Joel Drucker, “Billie Jean King: Leveling the Playing Field,” Biography, September 1998, 102–7; BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 82; Karen Blumenthal, Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX, the Law that Changed the Future of Girls in America (Atheneum: New York, 2005), 51. Here is the full quote: “I’m sorry that the women's movement didn't include sports enough. We were so visible. We could have been a great conduit for social change. But while the women's movement was very friendly, we didn't connect like we could have. The discussion always went to legislation, to what Congress was doing. We were all so busy.”

  19 Lichtenstein, “King, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Me,” 104–5; Lopiano quoted in Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle, 159. Lopiano was making a broader point about how “the women's movement never embraced Title IX as an athletics position.” As sports psychologist Jan Felshin noted in 1973, “The women's movement has seemed reluctant to confront the institution of sport directly. It has been dismissed as a ‘fascist’ domain by some, and the woman athlete has not been embraced as a sister in the struggle for liberation. Perhaps, as a symbolic sphere, sport does not seem a crucial testing ground for women's power, and, possibly, sport achievement is always singularly related to excellence and, therefore, of limited usefulness as a source of expanding opportunities for women.” Elkins, “Time for Change,” 24.

  20 Valerie Miner and Helen E. Longino, eds., Competition: A Feminist Taboo? (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1987); Boston women's Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 86–87. This is the first mass-market paperback edition; the original New England Free Press version, Women and Their Bodies: A Course by the women's Health Collective (1970), did not say anything about physical activity and sports.

  21 Pat Griffin, “Diamonds, Dykes, and Double Plays,” in Susan Fox Rogers, ed., Sports-dykes: Storiesfrom On and Off the Field (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 191–201. See also Enke, Finding the Movement.

  22 Elkins, “Time for a Change,” 24; Donna Lopiano, “A Political Analysis of the Possibility of Impact Alternatives for the Accomplishment of Feminist Objectives Within American Intercollegiate Sport,” in Richard E. Lapchick, ed., Fractured Focus: Sport as a Reflection of Society (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1986), 168. The essay originally dates to 1982.

  23 M. Ann Hall, “The Significance of the Body,” Feminism and Sporting Bodies: Essays on Theory and Practice (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1996), 50. Ms. devoted its entire August 1977 issue to sports, including a Tomboy Hall of Fame. Not surprisingly, many of the unconventional women who embraced feminism had also been unconventional as young girls, often earning them the tag of tomboy. But rarely did their tomboy days translate into a lifelong interest in sports.

  24 The voluminous National Organization for Women papers are at the Schlesinger Library, and I have sampled them selectively. The majority of material on sports is found in boxes 31 and 49.

  25 Judy Wenning to NOW National Board of Directors, July 3, 1973, NOW, SL; Goals of the NOW National Task Force on Sports, 1973–1974, no date [probably summer 1973], NOW, SL. For example, the national office forwarded all mail and inquiries on sports topics to the task force, which then only had $50 allotted for postage for correspondence; due to financial and time constraints, the task force was unable to answer all letters personally.

  26 Anne Grant and Judy Wenning to NOW task forces, March 8, 1974, NOW, SL; Char Mollison to Anne Perry, December 28, 1977, WEAL, SL; Mary Jean Collins letter, April 16, 1985, NOW, SL. WEAL was just setting up its clearinghouse and hoped to work in cooperation with NOW

  27 Ann Scott and Mary Ellen Verheyden-Hilliard to State Legislative Coordinators, n.d. [summer 1974), NOW, SL. This firm stand by the national leadership may or may not have been shared by activists at the grassroots level. For example, a memo from Jan Cunningham to the Women in Sports Task Force People dated February 21, 1975 [NOW, SL] took note of what she called the “separatists vs. integrationists controversy”: “The integrationist argument that we’ve had separate but equal in the past and it hasn't worked is valid. On the other hand, the separatist argument that women are not physically capable of competing with men (in some sports) or aren't ready to compete with men, is also valid. Obviously, the answer lies somewhere in between and we should begin re-evaluating our individual positions on this question in an attempt to find a workable compromise.” It didn't seem to occur to her that there might not be a compromise between those two positions.

  28 For background on protective legislation, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 2oth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also Nancy Woloch, Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 1996).

  29 In addition to Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity, see Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politic
s of women's Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004)

  30 Ellie Smeal to NOW Chapter President, Convenor, Sports or Education Chair-One, November 14, 1973, NOW, SL.

  31 Holly Knox to NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund Board members, October 31, 1974, PEER, SL. Unless otherwise indicated, quotes are drawn from the document that was submitted to HEW. The Center for National Policy Review was located at the School of Law, the Catholic University of America in Washington. See also their background legal memorandum: “Validity of the ‘Separate but Equal’ Policy of the Title IX Regulation on Athletics” [1974], PEER, SL.

  32 Anne Grant to J. Stanley Pottinger, January 28, 1973, Dunkle, SL.

  33 NOW-LDEF comments to HEW, October 31, 1974, PEER, SL.

  34 Grant to Pottinger, January 28, 1973, Dunkle, SL.

  35 ‘A Proposal for a New Pennsylvania NOW Sports Position in Light of the Commonwealth Court Decision Against the PIAA,” n.d. [c. 1974–1975], NOW, SL. “Because girls and boys will be separated many will be encouraged to argue they should be separated.… There is also the real possibility that girls sports themselves will instill in girls the illusion that they cannot compete with boys.” For more on affirmative action, see note 40.

  36 Billie Jean King used this formulation when I interviewed her in Boston on November 27, 2007. Over the years she has often used the phrase when discussing her frustrations with how second-wave feminists failed to understand the importance of sports and physical activity.

  37 Interview with Gwen Gregory, May 9, 1986, transcript found in Dunkle, SL.

  38 Bernice Resnick Sandler, “Title IX: How We Got It and What a Difference It Made,” Cleveland State Law Review 55 (2008): 482; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), especially chapter 7.