Published: April 26, 2001
Women's sport in the United States, which has a population of 268 million, reaches far beyond its borders and has had an enormous influence on women's sport around the world. Two sports that originated in the United States, basketball and volleyball, are now among the world's most popular sports. In addition, the United States has become a major training center for athletes from many nations and Title IX, the 1972 U.S. legislation that has been credited with encouraging much of the growth in women's sports in the United States, has also helped to influence thinking about women's sports elsewhere in the world. U.S. companies are also major producers of sports equipment and clothing.
Women's experiences in the sporting life of the United States defy neat historical generalizations. In part this is because women never constituted a single group, and their behaviors and attitudes never conformed to a single general pattern. Women's roles also varied across time, connected as they were to the broader ideological and economic contexts. Sometimes women were active participants (in the modern sense) in a sport, while at other times they were behind-the-scenes producers or promoters.
Occasionally as well, women were consumers of sports, or spectators, and there were times when perceptions of women's physical and moral “natures, affected sporting values, codes of conduct, rules, and even whether an activity was a sport or not. Indeed, the perceptions of women as the “weaker sex” helps to account for both the designation of bowling as an “amusement” when women engaged in it in the nineteenth century and the development of the divided court in basketball. Even today fans and the press persist in requiring basketball to be preceded by “women's.” Women play women's basketball, while men simply play basketball.
Too often historians present women's sporting experiences as if they were rooted only in modern society and became increasingly more complex and common. The latter characterization is accurate for a particular period, such as the twentieth century, but across time, women's sporting experiences were episodic rather than evolutionary. At any given time they shaped, as much as they were shaped by, the wider web of social, economic, and political experiences.The evolution of women's role in sport in the United States can be divided into three major periods: the colonial era, the transitional nineteenth century, and the age of modern sports.
The Colonial Era: Women and Traditional Sports and GamesWomen were far more visible in American sporting life across time than the portraits of them in many histories would suggest, and for no period is this statement more true than in the years before the mid-18th century. About 1600, before Europeans colonized the land that would become the United States, the earliest American sportswomen were Native Americans whose style of life must be characterized as a traditional one in which sports and other displays of physical prowess were embedded in the rhythms and relations of ordinary life. Religious ceremonies, for example, called on women, and men, to dance for hours at a time, while rites of passage from maidenhood to womanhood included physical displays and tests. Ball games occurred in the context of women's daily tasks, and the outcomes could affect one's place in the family or the village. Even equipment and items for wagering, which women often controlled, came from the material stores of wood, corn, shells, and animal hides that were used and valued in everyday life.
The migration of colonists from Europe, especially Britain, and then Africa began shortly after 1600, and these people, too, fashioned a traditional, organic style of life in which sports were interspersed with ordinary tasks and rituals. Initially, women were few among the colonists, and not surprisingly, there were few opportunities for sports other than hunting and tavern games. After mid-century, however, the gender ratio gradually evened out, and a critical mass of women were present to assume their traditional roles as workers in the fields and homes and as producers of community gatherings, fairs, and family events. Some women owned the equipment with which settlers played games, especially card games. In rural areas where harvest festivals came to be fairly common, women prepared the food that the grain-cutters would consume during the post-harvest celebration. Then, too, villages and the emerging towns became the settings for diverse social practices. On warm summer days in New England, husbands and wives fished and sailed on the numerous waterways. Towns like Boston, Providence, and Hartford offered an even broader variety of sports and recreations, ranging from dances to races to fist fights. By the early eighteenth century emerging cities were sites for public, commercial, and physical displays, including tightrope dancing by women and men.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the sporting experiences of women of European and African ancestries, as well as recent immigrants, were far more varied than they had been earlier. Enslaved African and African American women found some solace in their brief respites from work on Sundays, in the evenings, or in the days of celebrating made possible by the observance of holidays when they danced, played simple games, and ran races. Agricultural fairs, initiated by white farmers, planters, and traders, also included contests, especially foot races, for black women who competed for articles of clothing. White farm women also made possible and engaged in an array of games, contests, and dancing at their rural festivals and family events such as weddings and funerals. Occasionally as well, women in farming communities raced horses, even against men, and they were willing to wager on their skills.
Middle- and upper-class women, especially those who either lived in or visited towns and cities, had access to the broadest range of sports and other recreations. In the South, white women who lived on plantations raced horses and went fox hunting. As did their northern contemporaries, they also attended balls, played cards, and attended the increasing array of physical culture exhibitions, which included race walking, tumbling and acrobatic displays, and equestrian shows.
The Nineteenth Century: Domesticity and the Age of Diminishing ReturnsThe pursuit of active sports by women was not to persist, however. During the second half of the eighteenth century, a series of complex changes gradually altered gender roles and relations. Enlightenment ideology and the emergent capitalist economy combined to redefine women's place, to move them into the home and away from public activity, and to emphasize biological differences (from men) as grounds for keeping them there. In effect, the famous “doctrine of separate spheres” drew from the same movements that resulted in a new nation and a Declaration of Independence that proclaimed “all men are created equal.” The phrase was not tongue-in-cheek; even before 1800, women were seen as morally superior but physically inferior to men. The characterization lasted for more than a century and a half.
The immediate impact of these changes was the movement of many, though by no means all, women off the tracks and fields and into the stands, or out of public view entirely, unless accompanied by men. The trend was especially pronounced in towns and cities among middle- and upper-class people whose lives were increasingly shaped by commercial and industrial tasks and rhythms and who came to believe that women's central role was to bear and nurture children and families. Slave and free women who continued to live and work on farms and plantations, as well as the increasing number who joined in the westward migration, did not experience the full weight of these changes in roles and lifestyles. Indeed, the experiences of such women in 1850 more closely resembled those of their predecessors in 1750 and even 1650 than they did their urban contemporaries. They remained visible producers and consumers of traditional sports and other displays of physical prowess.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, perceptions and real experiences suggested to some people that the health of middle- and upper-class women in urbanizing areas was declining. Educators, doctors, and writers of popular magazine articles responded with analyses and prescriptions for improving women's health, including calls for renewed physical exertion via exercises and games. The logic of the health literature was simple and straightforward: if women were to fulfill their roles as caretakers of families and national virtue, they needed to maintain their physical and mental health. People such as Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyons, and Diocletian Lewis thus argued for the physical education of women, started schools, and laid out regimens of calisthenics, domestic exercises (e.g., sweeping), and traditional activities such as walking and riding. The movement to return women to physically active pursuits had begun, albeit in their private, domestic sphere.
This would not, however, occur overnight. The urban areas that were home to many of the women targeted by the likes of Beecher and Lewis, as well as the economic activities that powered such areas, had reduced the social power of traditional sports and engendered an emerging new form, modern sports. Constructed by men for men, games such as baseball were becoming popular in eastern urban centers at mid-century. Other activities such as skating, croquet, and rowing were also modernizing acquiring rules, specialized playing spaces, and an organizational base in clubs. Only gradually did women gain access to such forms. In the 1850s they did so primarily as spectators and moral guardians. Especially at baseball games, male promoters hoped that women would bring their perceived moral superiority to bear on the crowds and ensure social order.
Challenging Gendered Boundaries Not all the middle- and upper-class women were content to remain on the periphery of the action, sporting or otherwise. As of 1848, a feminist movement had formalized at Seneca Falls, New York, and especially in the North, other movements such as abolitionism both encouraged women to be social agents and demonstrated that their reappearance in the public domain endangered neither their health nor that of the nation. Moreover, the dynamic events of mid-century, including the War between the States (1861-65) challenged the gender boundaries and expectations that had confined women to the domestic sphere for more than three generations.
Challenge is the appropriate word here, for middle- and upper-class urban women both found and made opportunities in public society during and after the Civil War that drew from their long-defined practices in their domestic sphere. Nursing and teaching were precisely such activities, but they were also ones that required additional training as well as sound constitutions. Not surprisingly, then, some women demanded and received access to colleges, where they did as their brothers did: they began to participate in some of the emerging modern sports whose social power was increasing in the aftermath of the Civil War and the technological and communication changes of the 1860s and 1870s. At private colleges such as Vassar in New York and Smith and Wellesley in Massachusetts, women students formed clubs to play baseball and, quickly, tennis, croquet, and archery. College administrators and faculty responded, initially to the influx of women and their own fears about the negative impact of intellectual work on women students, with requirements for medical examinations, exercise and gymnastics regimens, and the gradual absorption of women's sport clubs.
Outside of the colleges, post-war middle- and upper-class women were also moving to take advantage of the increasing array of modern sports. Local gymnasiums, armories turned into playing areas, and a host of clubs that formed as men and women sought new forms of community provided urban and townswomen with opportunities for a range of sports, from skating and rowing to trap shooting and tennis. Such activities continued to stretch the bounds of activity acceptable for and to women. They also quieted some of the fears held especially by the male-dominated medical profession about the negative effects that physical movement in sports might have on women's biology and reproductive functions.
An even more significant challenge to the nearly century-old ideology that placed women in the home and in subservience to men came in the form of a machine, the bicycle. Invented in Europe in the early 19th century, early versions of the bicycle had appeared in various forms and had become the object of short-lived fads through the 1860s. Then came the invention of the “ordinary” (one large and one small wheel) and, subsequently, the “safety” cycle, and the latter especially appealed to women. Bicycle riding, and even some racing, became popular, and the practice afforded women with a means of physical mobility and freedom that they had not known for generations, since the days when horse ownership was common and expected, even by women. Significantly, as well, the bicycle catalyzed dress reform. Bloomers and knickerbockers went on, and corsets came off. The day of the “new woman” was about to dawn.
The Age of Modern SportsHistorians have labeled the period from the 1890s to World War I as the Progressive era, largely because “progress” was the goal of contemporaries, especially members of the urban middle class. Achievement did not always match rhetoric, but many women did see their positions and the quality of their lives enhanced. Some urban working women, for instance, earned more pay and improved conditions, and perhaps not surprisingly, some of the industries that employed women organized, first, calisthenics or physical culture classes and then team sports to promote personal health and worker efficiency. Such programs became more widespread after the turn of the century, and by the 1920s individual companies and regional industries had multiple teams in sports such as basketball, bowling, tennis, baseball, volleyball, and eventually softball. Among the results were good advertising for the companies and competitive opportunities and even, on occasion, additional income for the athletes.
Another group of women whose lives came to incorporate opportunities for competitive sports were the upper-class women. In the 1870s and 1880s such women had joined clubs, social clubs, country clubs, and then sport-specific clubs, just as had their brothers and husbands. They also engaged in sports in colleges and, importantly, on their vacations or extended stays in Europe. By 1900 seven of these women competed in their first Olympics, in Paris, and despite the enduring opposition of the prime mover behind the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, women consistently competed in the Games thereafter, albeit in small numbers and in socially acceptable sports such as tennis, archery, and even figure skating by 1924.
The Progressive era history of middle-class women's sporting experiences is more complicated. Especially before the turn of the century, they did experience considerable latitude in forming sport clubs and organizing competitions and appeared to gain a degree of physical and personal freedom to sport similar to that enjoyed by their working and upper-class sisters. Indeed, they initially popularized the newly created sports of basketball and volleyball, and it was the rapid spread of such sports, as well as field hockey, cycling, and tennis, that encouraged their teachers and recreation supervisors to form associations and write rules. In men's experiences, it was precisely such associations that were critical to the promotion and expansion of modern sports.
However, many of the women who came to control sports for girls and adults, especially in institutions such as schools and colleges, had accepted the warnings of the medical profession that unfettered athletic competition would harm female participants, physically and psychologically, and detract from or even diminish their femininity. Consequently, in the 1890s, women physical educators began to limit sport contests, initially by changing the rules of some games, such as basketball, and eventually by altering the very nature of contests. By 1920 school and college sports were often played not in contests between teams representing their institutions, but in play days or sport days, in which the convened teams were broken up and the players assigned to mixed school teams.
By the 1920s the conservative approach of women physical educators was quite distinct from, indeed, out of sync with, the attitudes and expectations of many other people. The United States was experiencing its first mature burst of popular consumerism, which was buoyed by a fun ethic and a relatively expansive economy. Clubs and teams for women proliferated, in part as more institutions, from urban governments to churches to saloons, sponsored teams or provided facilities. Improvements and declining prices of sporting goods, as well as the increasing popularity of sports spectating and sports as entertainment also spurred the organization of leagues, both amateur and semi-pro. Beyond the pale of physical educators, the latter provided underground opportunities for middle-class athletes.
After 1929 the Great Depression disrupted this sporting boom, but it did not end it entirely. In fact, the popularity of industrial sport likely peaked in the 1930s, and sports such as softball and bowling became extremely popular among women. Women's Olympic competition also gained more popular support, in part because of great performances by athletes such as Mildred “Babe” Didrikson and in part because support continued to diminish for the mythology of the negative physical and biological consequences of athletics for women. Significantly as well, women continued to enter nontraditional roles, a trend that became more pronounced as World War II began. After 1941 more and more women took jobs that had once belonged to the men who went abroad to fight. Even professional baseball opened its doors to women via the All-American Girls Baseball League financed by Philip Wrigley of chewing gum and Chicago Cubs fame.
Now famous in part because of the movie,
A League of Their Own, the All-American Girls Baseball League began play in 1943 in mid-size cities in the Great Lakes region. The athletes were not, to be sure, the first professional women athletes in the United States. In the modern era that honor likely belongs to female distance walkers in the 1870s and 1880s and rodeo competitors in the twentieth century. Nor were they the only women professional athletes of the decade. After 1949 the Ladies Professional Golf Association organized, offering $15,000 in purse money spread over nine tournaments. Five years later, women golfers could earn $225,000 a year on the LPGA tour.
In the 1940s as well, an even more significant movement developed in African American colleges. Track and field teams were training at places such as Tuskegee Institute and Tennessee State, and these colleges would produce the athletes that would integrate U.S. women's Olympic teams and revolutionize the contests and the records. By the early 1960s African-American athletes such as Wilma Rudolph ran record-pace after record-pace, opening doors for other black women and paving the way for Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith Joyner, among numerous others. Other sports such as bowling and tennis also integrated in the post-World War II years.
The Sixties BoomA greater revolution in women's sports lay ahead. In the late 1960s the modern feminist movement, a youth culture, and other sources of social unrest unsettled both the nation as a whole and the sports world in particular. Billie Jean King defied international tennis tradition and authorities at Wimbledon in 1968, when she demanded an end to under-the-table payments; then she defeated another symbol of patriarchy, Bobby Riggs, on the court in 1973. In between King's two strikes for honesty and women, she helped organize the first of several early 1970s professional leagues for women, the Virginia Slims tennis tour.
King symbolized the commencement of contemporary women's revolution in sports, the realization of the image projected in the 1890s “new woman.” Legislation, especially Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, and the subsequent and ongoing litigation against unequal opportunities in institutions continued it, and probably had a greater impact on more women. Schools and colleges that accept federal funds now must provide athletic opportunities for women proportional to the number of women they enroll, and few women are unaffected.
ConclusionThere has been a dynamic and continuing growth of women's sports since the late 1960s. Triathlons, marathons, soccer, aerobics, weightlifting, rugby, skiing, two professional basketball leagues (although one folded in late 1998), athletic clubs, and even cheerleading are among the many sports available to women, none of which existed a century ago and few of which existed a generation earlier. What remains unknown is the full impact of the generation of women who are now maturing and who grew up with opportunities that their mothers and grandmothers never dreamed of.
The experience and involvement of U.S. women in the sporting world, and their demand for equal access to individual participation and to the financial rewards of professional sports, continue to influence the development of women's sports around the world. The U.S. Women's Sports Foundation, formed in 1974, has helped other countries, including the United Kingdom and Japan, to form their own Women's Sports Foundations; the organizations have no formal ties. In addition, the Women's Sports Foundation (U.S.) was in May 1999 granted consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, which makes it possible for the organization to provide input to the Council on women's issues and women's sports participation around the world, with the goal of advancing sport “as a vehicle for addressing global issues affecting girls and women.”
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