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  • Pressure Is a Privilege: Billie Jean King, Title IX, and Gender Equity
  • Amanda L. Paule-Koba (bio)
Susan Ware. Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 296 pp. Photographs, graphs, notes, and index. $30.00.

In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act was passed, stating: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”1 In the almost forty years since its passage, girls and women have experienced a tremendous amount of growth in the sporting opportunities available to them. According to R. V. Acosta and L. J. Carpenter, in 1968 there were 16,000 female collegiate athletes.2 By 2010 that number had increased to over 180,000 female athletes participating on over 9,000 intercollegiate teams. This increase in participation numbers can be attributed to a generation of female athletes who have grown up in a post–Title IX era and have benefitted from participation in organization sport.3

In the book Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, Susan Ware—an independent scholar who specializes in U.S. history, women’s history, and biography—blends sport, history, feminism, and a discussion of social change. Ware describes the social change movement that began in the late 1960s and through which Billie Jean King struggled and ultimately triumphed to become a tennis superstar and women’s sports icon. The author uses King as a centerpiece to articulate and illustrate the complex relationship of sport, gender, and Title IX.

Ware’s book is grounded in the period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. She began by setting the groundwork of the content of this book with a prologue that describes the epic “Battle of the Sexes” match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs on September 20, 1973. Ware stated that this was not simply a tennis match; it was more than that, but, at the time, no one could really state why this was so. According to Ware, this event was the “perfect storm” for a rapidly changing and politically polarized country needing a diversion from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Riggs himself, who [End Page 711] made what most would consider sexist comments leading up to the match, exacerbated the media attention to this match. All of this helped King realize that she was not just playing a tennis match; she was carrying the women’s movement and the hopes of all women on her shoulders. King’s straight-set win over Riggs was a win for women everywhere. Donna Lopiano, former executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, summed up King’s win and its context within the women’s movement in a New York Times editorial by stating: “In a single tennis match, Billie Jean King was able to do more for the cause of women than most feminists can achieve in a lifetime” (p. 2).

Ware summed up her prologue by noting that, without feminism and the feminist ideals of that time in history, Billie Jean King would have been just another athlete. People who had never followed tennis in their lives watched or listened to this one match. In essence, feminism and Billie Jean King used one another for success and attention. The author noted: “Because of her [King’s] relationship to second-wave feminism, she came to embody the aspirations and dreams of the modern women’s movement in her role as popular heroine from the world of sports” (p. 10). Billie Jean King was the rare athlete who brought together sport and feminism, and, in doing so, she put a human face on the ideals of liberal feminism.

The first chapter of the book discussed Billie Jean (Moffitt) King’s life before and during her tennis career. She was born January 22, 1943, in California. Growing up, King’s parents had traditional gender roles. Her father made the decisions and worked outside the home, while her...

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