by Gail Collins
“DO YOU PREFER THEM ACTUALLY?”
At a presidential bill signing in 1973, Richard Nixon turned to Helen Thomas, the veteran wire service reporter. “Helen, are you still wearing slacks?” he asked. “Do you prefer them actually? Every time I see girls in slacks, it reminds me of China.” The remark may have been intrusive, but it was still an improvement from Washington a decade or so earlier, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg applied for a Supreme Court clerkship and Justice Felix Frankfurter rejected her after asking, “Does she wear skirts? I can’t stand girls in pants.”
The clothes women wore to work had changed dramatically, and that was no small matter for a generation that had grown up wrapped in heavy girdles and fragile nylons. The arbiters of fashion were suddenly “making it easier to be a woman,” wrote Susan Brownmiller. “Lipstick color had lightened to a mere touch of gloss. Thanks to the wonders of Lycra, panty hose and a bra slip had replaced wires, garters, and girdles, allowing me to breathe normally for the first time since high school. Wobbly heels, the bane of my existence, were ‘out’ and flats were ‘in.’ Nails were permitted to be short and unpolished, hair didn’t need to be teased and lacquered, the pantsuit had come into vogue, and skirts were completing their startling climb from below the knee to mid-thigh.” Jane O’Reilly, recalling the first time she “stepped out on the streets of downtown New York City wearing blue jeans,” said, “To my astonishment, no lightning bolt struck me down because I was not ‘dressed for town.’ The world had changed. I could put away the dark cotton, white gloves, and black pumps. The era of pin curls, waist cinchers, and girdles had ended.”
Shoes were a feminist issue for some women, who loathed stiletto heels for their artificiality and discomfort. A “Stamp Out High Heels” movement blamed them for everything from “leg ache” to “inability to run from rapists.” During the ’60s the shoe reformers seemed to be getting their wish, as chisel-toed shoes with modest heels and thigh-high boots became the favored style for dressy occasions. (A fashion report in 1966 had announced that one of the loftiest shoe designs of the season was a “Pilgrim-buckled pump with a one-inch heel.”) However, by the early ’70s younger women had embraced another style that was an outright invitation to leg fractures: platform shoes with enormous soles that could reach four inches or more. And by the end of the decade, the high heel had inched back, although politically sensitized designers suggested that women wanted to wear them “to please themselves, perhaps, rather than to attract attention from men, as in the past.”
“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY RACE.”
For all the moments that symbolized the changes for women in the 1970s, one of the most famous was also one of the cheesiest—the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973. It was on one level an extremely silly contest to settle the question of whether one of the world’s greatest athletes in her prime could beat an out-of-shape 55-year-old man. But it was also a master course in how to disarm the most powerful weapon against women’s fight for equality—ridicule.
Americans had always been uncomfortable with the idea of women athletes, although they had, on occasion, fallen in love with an exception. When Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel in 1926, and did it nearly two hours faster than the five men who had gone before, she got a ticker-tape parade in New York City—and ears so damaged by the swim she was deaf at 27. In 1932 Babe Didrikson, an Olympic gold medalist in track and field, was also a professional baseball player, a star at tennis and swimming, and, most spectacular of all, a golfer who won her third U.S. Women’s Open after cancer surgery had forced her to play with a colostomy bag. Esther Williams was a member of the U.S. Olympic team that never got to compete when the war canceled the 1940 games, and she wound up instead swimming through some very silly and extremely popular MGM movies.
Wilma Rudolph, a poor black girl with a left leg partially paralyzed from polio, spent her childhood shuttling from her small hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, to physical therapy in Nashville, while learning the brutal truths about what it felt like to be consigned to the back of the bus. She was finally allowed to play basketball for her high school team—and walked onto the court to score thirty-two points in her first game. She took up running for “pure enjoyment” and went off to college to become a world-class track star. She won three gold medals at the first Olympic Games that Americans were able to watch on television. “There was no doubt she was the fastest woman the world had ever seen,” said Time. Rudolph was congratulated by the pope and the president and, in what must have been the sweetest moment of all, given a banquet in her hometown that marked the first time “in Clarksville’s history that blacks and whites had gathered under the same roof for the same event.” But for all her celebrity, Rudolph could not make a career out of her talent. There was absolutely no room in American culture for a woman professional athlete. She wound up teaching school and coaching.
In the Victorian era—when Americans disliked the idea of women moving around much at all—reformers brought physical education into girls’ schools under the guise of health classes. At the start of the 1960s, most people still regarded athletics for women as being all about fitness, not competition. Altha Cleary, who attended Indiana University in the 1950s as a physical education major, said women students who got caught taking part in actual athletic contests were tossed out of the program. “Our department chair there said… girls were psychologically unfit: we would cry all the time if we lost.”
The idea of mixing the sexes in sports was regarded as particularly improper. In 1950 Kathryn Johnston, 12, broke into the Corning, New York, Little League disguised as a boy named “Tubby.” She was good enough that when she confessed, the team decided to keep her on the field anyway. But the next year the Little League instituted a new regulation barring girl players. It was informally known as the “Tubby Rule.” In 1966 Roberta Gibb hid in the bushes by the starting line for the Boston Marathon, jumping out to join the other runners when the gun went off. Gibb had been training for the race in Vermont by running alongside the horses over a two-day, sixty-five-mile equestrian event, but her application for the marathon had been rejected on the grounds that women were not built to run long distances. As an unofficial entrant, she finished one hundred twenty-sixth out of four hundred fifty runners, but the ban on women continued to hold. The next year, Kathrine Switzer, a Syracuse University junior, got an official number in the marathon by entering as “K. V. Switzer.” About three miles into the race, she was attacked by an official, Jock Semple, who tried to tear off her number, yelling, “Get the hell out of my race.”
The Boston Marathon would finally allow women to run in 1972, and the Little League would integrate the following year, after a series of court cases filed by the angry parents of athletic little girls. In professional sports, the women’s fight for recognition was fiercest, and most successful in tennis. Much of that was due to Billie Jean King.
“LITTLE GIRL, YOU CAN’T BE IN THE PHOTO.”
The story begins with another fight over pants—or in this case, tennis shorts. “Little girl, you can’t be in the photo,” an official told the 11-year-old Billie Jean Moffitt when she joined the group for the team picture at her first tournament. “You’re not wearing a skirt or tennis dress.” It was a moment of humiliation she always remembered. The shorts were not a matter of rebellion. Billie Jean’s lower-middle-class family did not know anything about the dress code at the posh Los Angeles Tennis Club, where the competition was being held. The shorts had been carefully sewn by her mother in what the Moffitts thought would be the right look for the big game.
By the time she went to college, Billie Jean had already won the Wimbledon doubles championship, but she was working her way through Los Angeles State as a playground attendant. Athletic scholarships for women were virtually nonexistent. Larry King, the aspiring lawyer who she would soon marry, kept pointing out to her that he was “the seventh man on a six-man team” as a tennis player and still got money from the school, whi
le she was the best-known athlete on campus and got nothing.
After she committed herself to a career as a professional athlete, Billie Jean Moffitt King began to rebel against the difference in prize money for men and women players. In 1970 the Pacific Southwest Open became the last straw—the male winner was scheduled to get $12,500, and the woman $1,500. The promoter was adamant that he would not go higher, so King and eight other top female players boycotted the event, playing instead at a hastily organized tournament in Houston sponsored by Philip Morris. It was the beginning of the Virginia Slims women’s tennis tour, the increasing popularity of women’s tennis, and a corresponding rise in purses. (King, always grateful for the cigarette maker’s support, would never criticize Virginia Slims’ marketing, which featured a jingle that announced triumphantly, “You’ve come a long way, baby, to get where you’ve got to today. You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby. You’ve come a long, long way!”) As the marquee name who had made it all happen, Billie Jean was on the cover of Sports Illustrated as athlete of the year in 1972—the first time the place of honor had been given to a woman.
The idea of all this money and attention going to female tennis players was supremely irritating to some of the men, who regarded women’s tennis as far inferior to the game they played. “Women belong in the bedroom and kitchen, in that order,” said Bobby Riggs, a 55-year-old over-the-hill pro and natural-born hustler who quickly realized that he could get more attention, and money, as the champion of male chauvinism than in his previous incarnation as champion of the tennis senior circuit. Women’s tennis “stinks,” he said; their play was so bad that even an old man like him could beat the very best the women had to offer. He challenged the top female players to prove him wrong, and Margaret Court leaped at the chance to make $10,000 for what she seemed to think was an ordinary exhibition match. (Court, who would later become a conservative preacher, had little enthusiasm for women’s rights issues.)
King was horrified at the possibility of an embarrassing defeat. If Court insisted on playing, King told her, she had to win: “You have no idea how important this is.” The match was held on Mother’s Day, and Riggs presented Court with a bouquet of roses. Taken aback, she curtsied politely. (It was at that point, King said later, that she knew Court was doomed. “She should have smacked him over the head with them. She didn’t get it.”) Riggs’s slow, peculiar game threw Court off completely, and she was trounced, 6–2, 6–1. The triumphant Riggs wound up on the cover of Time, and he told anyone who would listen that King was next. “I want her. She’s the Woman’s Libber Leader,” he said.
King felt she had to accept the match. (“She won’t admit it, but I can see her coming apart at the seams already,” Riggs told Time.) The Court defeat had convinced a great many people—including some of the women tennis players—that Riggs was right and the women’s game was “so far beneath men’s tennis” that their best could not beat men’s deeply mediocre. King threw herself into training and understood that she had to win the battle of the hype as well. Whether women had strong backhands was secondary to the question of whether they could stand up to people who wanted to make fun of them. She had to give as good as she got even during a weird, unpredictable event that was going to be watched by more people than any tennis match in history. (ABC paid $750,000 for the broadcast rights at a time when NBC was paying $50,000 for the rights to Wimbledon.) When—just a half hour before the game—a promoter showed King a glitzy, chintzy Egyptian-style litter, held up by six underdressed young men, and hesitantly asked if she would consider riding in on it, she instantly said, “God, that would be great.” It made for a perfect demonstration that she saw the event for precisely what it was. King satirized the spectacle while literally beating Riggs at his own game. As forty-eight million people watched on TV, she sent him running after her returns until he was winded. The final score was 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. “I underestimated you,” Riggs told her.
“I thought it would set us back fifty years if I didn’t win that match,” King said. Her triumph was unalloyed, and fans of the game began to think it transcended the event’s frivolous roots. “Because of Billie Jean alone, who was representing a sex supposedly unequipped for such things, what began as a huckster’s hustle in defiance of serious athleticism ended up not mocking the game of tennis but honoring it. This night King was both a shining piece of showbiz and the essence of what sport is all about,” wrote Sports Illustrated. It was the moment—at least, as many Americans remembered it—when women’s sports arrived. Billie Jean King became one of the most famous athletes in the world, the most admired woman of her day. It was the ultimate repudiation of the Father Knows Best theory on the importance of losing to boys if you want to be popular.
“SECOND-CLASS CITIZENSHIP SOUNDS GOOD.”
Young women watching the King-Riggs match might have started dreaming of becoming the next female athletic superstars. But they weren’t getting much encouragement at their schools. Across the country, girls’ sports were given such short shrift it was amazing that their taxpaying parents never rose up in arms. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where girls’ sports got 9 percent of the athletic budget, the boys’ tennis team had courts, and the girls played on the school driveway, stopping the game whenever a motorist needed to get through. The women at the University of Kansas had to drive overnight to get to some of their track meets, and when they arrived, they slept on wrestling mats in the gym. (The male athletes were put up in hotels and transported at the university’s expense.) The public school system in Waco, Texas, had $1 million in athletic facilities and equipment, but girls had use of only the tennis balls. Jane L., a ninth-grade basketball player, wrote to Ms. magazine in 1973 to say that she and her teammates had to play their matches in their gym suits, while the school provided the boys with expensive new uniforms. When Jane asked if the girls could have uniforms as well, she was told “to earn the money through car washes, dances, and bake sales.” Billie Jean King’s inability to get a scholarship for her athletic talents was not unusual—the sum total of women’s athletic scholarships for the entire nation in 1972 was $100,000. Some public universities spent nothing whatsoever on women’s sports.
All that began to change after 1972, when Congress passed the law that is universally known as Title IX. The bill, sponsored by Patsy Mink and Edith Green in the House, banned discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funds—which meant virtually every school in the nation. (When the prickly Green retired, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote wryly that she “did not suffer fools gladly—including this one” but added that she should be remembered for having “presided over the enactment of the most important education legislation in the history of the Republic.”) At the time of its passage, most people who were paying attention thought Title IX was aimed at things such as opening up access to law and medical schools—which it certainly was. But in 1974 the federal agency tasked with coming up with regulations to implement the law said it also required schools to give women students comparable athletic opportunities.
Since an average Big Ten university invested thirteen hundred times as much money on the average male athlete as on the average female one, this was obviously going to mean huge changes—to the men’s disadvantage. (When Congresswoman Pat Schroeder visited a high school in her Denver district after the bill passed, the basketball coach told his team, “Show Mrs. Schroeder what you think of Title IX,” and the boys turned around and mooned her.) There were dire predictions that schools would have to give up football and spend all the money on field hockey. In fact, the government was not requiring equal spending—just equal opportunities. That did not mean giving volleyball the same amount of funding as football, but it did mean that the volleyball players would no longer have to change clothes in the women’s bathroom and that the men’s coaches were going to have to share their training facilities, money for scholarships, and playing time on the fields and in the gyms.
Thanks to Title IX, by 1984 there
were ten thousand athletic scholarships for women and thirty different national women’s collegiate championships, compared to none in 1970. The number of girls playing sports in high school and college quintupled. The Cedar Rapids Women’s Caucus quietly helped negotiate an agreement that got the girls off the driveway and onto the playing fields. “We got a lot more done than we’ll ever get credit for, but credit is something you can trade,” said Bev Mitchell, one of the caucus leaders. “You don’t care what history says if the important thing is to get the girls a place to play tennis off the street before they get hit.”
Critics questioned whether it went far enough—while the budget for women’s sports went up, spending on men often went up even faster, and there was certainly nothing approaching parity. It all depended on your perspective. “Second-class citizenship sounds good when you are accustomed to being regarded as fifth-class,” said Doris Brown, a former Olympic runner.
“YOU GOT MARRIED AND YOU NEVER TOLD ME.”
By the mid-’70s, anyone who was unaware that there was a women’s movement was living under a rock, and for all the controversy over the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, there were large parts of the women’s agenda that had overwhelming national support. Even an ardent traditionalist was likely to say that women deserved the same access to mortgages and credit cards as men. But American financial institutions didn’t respond of their own volition. Women were still being asked whether they planned to have children when they applied for a car loan. In 1974 Kathryn Kirschbaum, the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was told she could not have a BankAmerica card unless she got her husband’s signature. Billie Jean King was the winner of three Wimbledon titles in a single year and was supporting her household with the money she made from tennis. But she could not get a credit card unless it was in the name of her husband, a law student with no income. Letters urging Larry King to apply for credit cards arrived in the mail regularly, “and I’m the one getting him through school. I get zip,” she recalled.