by Susan Ware
39 Mary Jo Kane, “Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sport as a Continuum,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 19 (May 1995): 191–218. See also the final section of this chapter.
40 The attempt to increase opportunities for women in sports unfolded independently of the contentious debates on affirmative action in the 1970s. In some ways this is surprising, since there are many similarities between affirmative action's attempt to remedy or overcome the effects of past conditions that have limited inclusion or advancement, especially in employment, and the corresponding desire to win women spots in the male hierarchy of sports. Title IX does not require affirmative action, but it can be imposed after a finding of discrimination by HEW; like the empty threat to withhold federal money from offending institutions, HEW never pursued this remedy. In general, in the 1970s the sports debate was never framed around giving women preference or setting quotas; the assumption was that men's and women's interests could both be accommodated without undue sacrifice in separate but equal programs. Not until the 1990s do issues of “reverse discrimination” (the key issue of the 1978 Bakke case) become prominent as men's teams cut by their universities blame Title IX for their losses. For a general history of affirmative action, see Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also N. Peggy Burke, “Remedial and Affirmative Action,” in Patricia L. Geadelmann, Christine Grant, Yvonne Slatton, and N. Peggy Burke, eds., Equality in Sport for Women (Washington, D.C.: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1977).
41 For a summary of Title IX in the courts, see chapters 6 and 7 in Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta, Title IX (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 2005).
42 Susan Ware, Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007), 9; Sarah K. Fields, Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 70–71.
43 Patricia Geadelmann, “Court Precedents,” in Geadelmann, Equality in Sport for Women, 71; Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano, Playing with the Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal in Sports (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 125. Most of the decisions that did not take that stand came from the very early period (c. 1972–73), before the implications of cases such as Reed v. Reed were widely known.
44 Geadelmann, “Court Precedents,” 75; Fields, Female Gladiators, 41. For the activism of Pennsylvania NOW, see “A Proposal for a New Pennsylvania Sports Position in Light of the Commonwealth Court Decision against the PIAA”; Smeal to NOW chapter president, November 14, 1973; and “Pennsylvania NOW Supports State Board of Education—Opposes PIAA,” May 11, 1974, NOW, SL. In a similar case the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected a law that would have excluded girls from football and wrestling teams because it violated the state's equal rights amendment.
45 PIAA decision quoted in Gaedelmann, “Court Precedents,” 81.
46 Reed v. Nebraska School Activities Association (1972), cited in “Note: Sex Discrimination in High School Athletics,” Minnesota Law Review 57 (December 1972): 359.
47 Deborah Brake, “The Struggle for Sex Equality in Sport and the Theory Behind Title IX,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 34 (Fall 2000/Winter 2001): 25.
48 Fields, Female Gladiators, xi.
49 Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).
50 An excellent introduction is Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); the quotation from Hoyt v. Florida is on p. 181.
51 “Note: Sex Discrimination in High School Athletics,” 344–45.
52 Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies, 199–203; Katherine Ann Austin, “Recent Development: Constitutional Law—Equal Protection—Sex Discrimination in Secondary School Athletics,” Tennessee Law Review 222 (Fall 1978): 225–27. In an earlier case (Weeks v. Southern Bell Telephone Company [1969]), the Fifth Circuit had overturned one of the last vestiges of protective legislation by ruling that a limit on women lifting no more than thirty pounds on the job was discriminatory. The Weeks case has some interesting parallels to sports, offering a potential precedent that if an activity requires a physical attribute, the determination of qualifications for the job should be made on an individual basis, not based on an entire sex.
53 For example, it employed this standard in Craig v. Boren (1976) to declare unconstitutional an Oklahoma law that prohibited the sale of 3.2 percent beer to males under the age of twenty-one while setting the age for females at eighteen. Jody Feder, “Sex Discrimination and the United States Supreme Court: Developments in the Law,” Congressional Research Service (updated August 25, 2006), 2.
54 When draft registration was revived in the late 1970s during the Iranian and Afghanistan crises, President Jimmy Carter initially supported registering women for the draft, but many people did not and Congress limited the registration to men only. The Supreme Court upheld this male-only draft in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), ruling that the decision to register and/or draft women was up to Congress. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies, 288–99. Consistent with its reasoning about sports, the amicus brief in the draft case submitted by NOW-LDEF argued that excluding women from military service perniciously reinforced prevailing stereotypes: either there should be no draft, or both men and women should be drafted. Cited in Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 75.
55 For general treatments of second-wave feminism and the ERA, see Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern women's Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), and Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (New York: Free Press, 2003). See also Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA; and Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron DeHart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA.: A State and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
56 United States Commission on Civil Rights, Sex Bias in the U.S. Code: A Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), 5–6. The report was researched and written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brenda Feigen Fasteau.
57 Evans, Tidal Wave, 64–65; Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), chapter 10. A paper by Barbara Brown and Ann Freedman of the women's Law Project in Philadelphia dated May 6, 1975 [Dunkle, SL], looked at the application of the ERA to two cases of classifications based on sex which were purportedly justified by physical differences: athletics and life insurance. They concluded that the ERA would prohibit such classifications and that sex-blind systems would be “both fair and feasible.”
58 Christine Brennan, “Comparing Men, Women is Foolish,” USA Today, August 31, 2000, 3C. She adds parenthetically, “The more popular a woman's sport becomes, the louder the cacophony gets.”
59 Billie Jean King, “Why I believe that women must enter the crucible of sports competition with men,” Glamour, April 1984, 100; Cynthia Reader, “‘I’m a Special Kind of Woman; I’m a Transsexual,’“womenSports, December 1976, 37; “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 67; Jane Bosveld, “Billie Jean Talks Team-Tennis,” women's Sports and Fitness, July 1985, 16.
60 King, “Why I believe,” 100.
61 Barbara Gregorich, Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball (San Diego: Har-court Brace, 1993), 206; McDonagh and Pappano, Playing with the Boys, 221. See also Jennifer Ring, Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). As Laura Robinson put it in She Shoots, She Scores: Canadian Perspectives on Women in Sport (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1997), 9–10, “The sports section exists, I would maintain, because it is one sure-bet place where MEN ALWAYS WIN. Even if it's not your team that won last night, teams of men won something.”
62 Ellen J. Staurowsky, “Examining the Roots of a Gendered Division of Labor in Intercollegiate
Athletics: Insights into the Gender Equity Debate,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 19 (February 1995): 36; Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Atalanta Syndrome: Women, Sports and Cultural Values,” Scholar and Feminist Online 4.3 (2006).
63 Kane, “Exposing Sport as a Continuum,” 192; Mariah Burton Nelson, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 6–7; Jane English, “Sex Equality in Sports,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 7 (1978): 276.
64 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 373. Another group that challenges the current organization of sports is disabled athletes, who don't fit the categories but for different reasons: disabled athletes, male and female, can never compete on the same terms as physically able athletes; and yet with their dedication and skill they are clearly athletes, and they definitely compete, prodding us to think about what athletics means in new and different ways.
65 Michael A. Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 144–45; Nelson, The Stronger Women Get. Catharine MacKinnon made a similar point: “Most athletics, particularly the most lucrative of them, have been internally designed to maximize attributes that are identical with what the male sex role values in men.” Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 120.
66 Kane, “Exposing Sport as a Continuum,” 193.
67 April Austin, “Superstar Emeritus of women's Tennis Now on Business Side of Net,” Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 1988, 24.
68 Ibid.
69 Bosveld, “Billie Jean Talks Team-Tennis,” 16; Tom Cruze, “Ahead of Her Time; King focuses on a vision of sports that is equitable … and fun,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 16, 1997, 15.
70 Cruze, “Ahead of Her Time,” 15; Tom Weir, “King Triumph Monumental 20 Years Later,” USA Today, September 20, 1993, 1C; Bosveld, “Billie Jean Talks Team-Tennis,” 15–16.
71 King emphasized the importance of girls-only activity when I interviewed her in Boston on November 27, 2007. See Don Sabo, Kathleen E. Miller, Merrill J. Melnick, and Leslie Heywood, Her Life Depends On It: Sport, Physical Activity, and the Healthand Well-Being of American Girls (East Meadow, N.Y.: women's Sports Foundation, 2004). See also Don Sabo and Phil Veliz, Go Out and Play: Youth Sports in America (East Meadow, N.Y.: women's Sports Foundation, 2008). Two collections that capture the joys of women's sports especially well are Rogers, Sportsdykes, and Joli San-doz and Joby Winans, eds., Whatever It Takes: Women on women's Sport (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). See also Cahn, Coming On Strong.
72 Estelle Freedman, “Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 18701930,” Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979): 512–29. Fifty years after the Brown decision, with de facto school desegregation still firmly entrenched across the county, scholars and activists are rethinking some of the things lost, such as the leadership roles that black teachers in segregated schools had played in the African American community. See the special issue of the Journal of American History 91 (June 2004), especially Adam Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration,” 43–55.
73 Fields, Female Gladiators, 70.
74 Ann Crittenden Scott, “Closing the Muscle Gap: New Facts about Strength, Endurance—and Gender,” Ms., September 1974, 89.
Chapter Six
1 Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Larry Craig, Jim McGreevy, Bill Clinton—what a list. At least Jenny Sanford, the wife of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, refused the honor. See Lisa Belkin, “Public Displays of Disaffection,” New York Times Magazine, July 12, 2009, 9–10.
2 BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 10.
3 Mariah Burton Nelson, Are We Winning Yet? How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women (New York: Random House, 1991), 132–54; Neil Amdur, “Homosexuality Sets off Tremors,” New York Times, May 12, 1981, B11. See also Eric Anderson, In The Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); and Michael A. Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
4 Michelangelo Signorile, “I, ayatollah,” Outweek, May 29, 1991, 46–47, 78. Billie Jean King was not the first female public figure to be outed, although the only previous case that I can think of is feminist Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics (1970). Millett was married to an artist named Fumio Yoshimura but had a long history of involvements with women. When she was confronted about her sexuality at a Columbia forum in the fall of 1970, she admitted that she was a lesbian. Time magazine then used that admission to discredit the women's movement in general. Ironically, Time did not identify her as a lesbian, choosing instead to call her bisexual (“women's Lib: A Second Look,” Time, December 14, 1970). The end result was the same: “I had ‘come out,’“Millett ruefully concluded, “in ninety-seven languages.” For background on Millett, see Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); the quote is on p. 247.
5 “A Disputed Love Match,” Time, May 11, 1981, 77. For a general overview of media culture, see Larry P. Gross, Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
6 Pat Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1998), 180; “President Obama Names Medal of Freedom Recipients: 16 Agents of Change to Receive Top Civilian Honor.”
7 BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 20–21; “Larry and BillieJean King Work to Renew Their Marriage—And Put Her Affair Behind Them,” People, May 25, 1981, 76. See also Grace Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby: The Inside Story of the Women in Pro Tennis (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 175.
8 BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 26. The phrases are from the HBO documentary Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer, which first aired on April 26, 2006.
9 Selena Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005), 142, 143, 149. King insisted that Barnett work for her, not just be a companion, stating, “I hate freeloaders.” BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 31. See also Kenneth Denlinger, “King has Interference,” Washington Post, January 31, 1974, D5.
10 Pete Axthelm, “The Battle of the Sexes,” Newsweek, September 24, 1973, 85. See also Curry Kirkpatrick, “There She Is, Ms. America,” Sports Illustrated, October 1, 1973, 32.
11 Lichtenstein, A Long Way, Baby, 118, 166–67; Stephen Banker, “Who's Afraid of Virginia Wade?” Washington Post, July 8, 1976, E8. Here is Larry Gross on the plot of The Killing of Sister George: “The real message of the film was that being out of the closet was dangerous to your health.” Gross, Up from Invisibility, 62.
12 “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” Playboy, March 1975, 60; Frank Deford, “Mrs. Billie Jean King,” Sports Illustrated, May 19, 1975, 80; Gross, Up from Invisibility, 110, 132. This certainly included Deford. When interviewed for the 2006 HBO documentary about King, he recounted being asked by senior editors at Sports Illustrated whether King was a lesbian when she was being considered for Sportswoman of the Year in 1972, to which he replied flippantly that they said that about all women athletes and left it at that. The clear implication was that he knew better.
13 “Playboy Interview: Billie Jean King,” 196; “Larry and Billie Jean King Work to Renew Their Marriage,” 74.
14 Marvin Kitman, “Dirty Linen,” New Leader, June 15, 1981, 20. See also BJK, Billie Jean (1982), which co
ntains some excerpts of testimony from the trial describing the chronology.
15 Anne Taylor Fleming and Annie Leibovitz, “The Battles of Billie Jean King,” Women's Sports & Fitness, September/October 1998, 130; “Billie Jean's Odd Match,” Newsweek, May 11, 1981, 36; “A Disputed Love Match,” 77. Larry King opened the media event by referring to her as the woman “he has loved dearly for 19 years.” “Mrs. King Says She Had Lesbian Affair,” New York Times, May 2, 1981, 9.
16 Mark Shields, “If at First You Don't Succeed, Confess,” Washington Post, May 5, 1981, A19. Richard Cohen, “Billie Jean Apologizes—But Not Really,” Washington Post, May 26, 1981, C1, notes that having run “the media gauntlet … she has now been restored to a state of grace,” but at the cost of turning her back on her lover and her lifestyle. “There is a cheating quality to what King and the others have done. They do something, sometimes for quite a long time, and then duck the consequences when they get caught.” Calling it a mistake, “it becomes something you do when your husband is terribly busy—not a life style or a sexual preference you yourself have opted for.”
17 Kitman, “Dirty Linen,” 19; “Larry and Billie Jean King Work to Renew Their Marriage,” 73–77. The People interviewer was their friend Cheryl McCall, who had previously worked at womenSports magazine. See Cheryl McCall, “The Billie Jean King Case: A Friend's Outrage,” Ms., July 1981, 100. The Barbara Walters special aired on May 7, 1981.
18 Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle, 180; Jonathan Yardley, “Court and Sparkless,” Washington Post, August 18, 1982, B1. The review gets worse: “From first page to last, Billie Jean is an exercise in special pleading.” He calls her portrayal of herself “pushy, self-absorbed and self-deluded.” I have to agree that this book is not her finest moment.
19 “Mrs. King Offers to Quit as W.T.A. Head, So Not to Hurt Players,” New York Times, May 3, 1981, S5. “In many ways, my father is still in shock. My poor mother has been even slower to come around.” BJK, Billie Jean (1982), 215. Not until the 1990s did they get this all sorted out. Probably this story is not all that different from many other coming out stories. The difference is that King had to play hers out in public, long before she was ready.